http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/buzz/rss/ Recent content in Rss on Ariadne Hugo -- gohugo.io en-gb Tue, 16 Jul 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/editorial1/ Tue, 16 Jul 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/editorial1/ Readers who have been conversant with the recent travails of UKOLN [1] will have been aware that Ariadne has been, to put it mildly, living in interesting times. The closure of the Jisc Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN at the end of July 2013 had signalled the demise of the publication with the total number of issues reaching 71, after a period of reduced numbers of issues per year. Whatever the facts of the matter, I would have found it very hard not to feel I had personally failed in the mission of maintaining what must figure as a significant publication to this community of professionals and as a repository of their considerable enthusiasm, expertise and experience. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/cooper-brewerton/ Mon, 08 Jul 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/cooper-brewerton/ Reviewing Loughborough University Library’s Web site statistics over a 12-month period (October 2011 – September 2012) showed a monthly average of 1,200 visits via mobile devices (eg smart phones and tablet computers). These visits account for 4% of the total monthly average visits; but plotting the percentage of visits per month from such mobile devices demonstrated over the period a steady increase, rising from 2% to 8%. These figures were supported by comparison with statistics from the Library’s blog, where, over the same period, there was also a steady increase in the percentage of visits from mobile devices. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/stone-collins/ Mon, 08 Jul 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/stone-collins/ This article explores whether an online learning course can help academic researchers to become more familiar with social media tools, and seeks to understand how they can put them to use within their research and teaching activities. It does so by considering the development, implementation and evaluation of a pilot Web 2.0 course, 25 Research Things, an innovative online learning programme developed at the University of Huddersfield, which gives researchers a structured way to engage with selected Web 2. 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/69/bunting/ Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/bunting/ Tools and strategies for content management are a perennial topic in Ariadne. With more than one hundred articles touching on content management system (CMS) technologies or techniques since this online magazine commenced publication in 1996, Ariadne attests to continuing interest in this topic. Authors have discussed this topic within various contexts, from intranets to repositories and Web 2.0,  with some notable surges in references to 'content management' between 2000 and 2005 (see Figure 1 below).  Although levels of discussion are by no means trending, over recent years it is clear that Ariadne authors have taken note of and written about content management tools and techniques on a regular basis. 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/tyler/ Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/tyler/ Librarians are, in general, often quick to pick up and experiment with new technologies, integrating them into their work to improve the library service. Social media are no exception. This article seeks to show how the adoption of social media by different library sectors in Wales is helping to deliver and promote their library services. In Wales, the benefits of a small population (some three million people), good cross-library sector links, and the fact that libraries are a devolved issue (ie, the Welsh Government can create its own library policy), mean that it is possible to do things on an all-Wales scale. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/editorial2/ Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/editorial2/ I am pleased to introduce you to the content of Issue 68, and to have the opportunity to remind you that you have a far larger number of channels into the publication’s content. You can do so by using the Archive (for back issues), Authors or Articles tabs on the front page to search for material or information (in addition to the general search field top right) or you can casually browse the material offered by Today’s Choice, view the passing articles in the Gallery block to the right, or drill down into the Gallery from its tab. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/cope-jones/ Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/cope-jones/ The Connected Researcher initiative is a response to both local and sector-wide events. At the University of Bath groups of postgraduate research students from Chemistry and Social Sciences separately expressed an interest in finding out how to profile their own research and establish links with other researchers in their fields. Nationally there has been a growing wave of interest in the potential offered by social media for supporting all aspects of the research cycle as exemplified by the recent Digital Researcher events sponsored by Vitae [1] and the Research Information Network (RIN) publication Social media: A guide for researchers [2]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/editorial/ Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/editorial/ For readers who might have been wondering, I shall resist Mark Twain’s remark about reports of his demise being exaggerated, and reassure you that while Ariadne has been undergoing changes to the way in which it will be delivered to the Web, it has been business as usual in the matter of the content, as you will see from the paragraphs that follow. Issue 67, while currently not looking any different, is in the process of being migrated to a new platform developed to enhance functionality and give a more user-friendly look and feel to the publication. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/jones-et-al/ Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/jones-et-al/ [toc hidden:1] The MyMobileBristol Project is managed and developed by the Web Futures group at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol [1]. The project has a number of broad and ambitious aims and objectives, including collaboration with Bristol City Council on the development or adoption of standards with regard to the exchange of time- and location-sensitive data within the Bristol region, with particular emphasis on transport, the environment and sustainability. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/oer-hackday-2011-03-rpt/ Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/oer-hackday-2011-03-rpt/ The Open Educational Resources Hack Day event was designed to bring together those interested in rapidly developing tools and prototypes to solve problems related to OER. Whilst there is a growing interest in the potential for learning resources created and shared openly by academics and teachers, a number of technical challenges still exist, including resource retrieval, evaluation and reuse. This event aimed to explore some of these problem areas by partnering developers with the creators and users of OER to identify needs and potential solutions. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/guy/ Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/guy/ In 2007 Lorcan Dempsey coined the phrase ‘the amplified conference’ [1]. He used the term to refer to how event outputs (such as talks and presentations) were being amplified ‘through a variety of network tools and collateral communications’. The term ‘amplified event’ is now fairly well recognised within the academic and cultural heritage sectors and is used as an umbrella expression for many practices and technologies that allow not only those external to an event to participate but also those who are actually there to get more out of the event. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/ronson/ Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/ronson/ Now celebrating its 10th anniversary, Zetoc [1] provides quality-assured, comprehensive journal table of contents data for resource discovery that users can search and have delivered straight to their in-box or desktop. In a nutshell, Zetoc is all about convenience, current awareness and comprehensive coverage. In a recent survey, one academic commented: 'This is a "one-stop shop" for relevant literature'. What is Zetoc, what has it achieved and where is it going? http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/cope-rvw/ Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/cope-rvw/ Michael P. Sauers is a trainer in Internet technologies and this book is intended for librarians who have heard of blogging and RSS and want to start using these tools as soon as possible, but who may not have the expertise or confidence in their ability to start by themselves. The book provides a practical, how-to guide for those librarians thinking about starting a blog, whether for personal interest, professional development or for their institution. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/editorial/ Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/editorial/ With institutions searching to increase the impact of the work they do, and conscious of the immediate impact of any event they organise, many will be interested to read of 10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Amplify Your Event in which Marieke Guy provides a raft of suggestions to enhance the participants' experience of and involvement in, the event they are attending. For the unconvinced, they will be pleased to hear it is all Lorcan Dempsey's fault when in 2007 he made reference to the 'amplified conference', but as Marieke points out, the suggestions in her article do not amount to a dismissal of professional events teams but, rather, constitute a range of strategies they might wish to adopt in an environment where the expectation is of doing more with fewer resources. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/pennock-clark/ Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/pennock-clark/ The impact of the digital age upon libraries has been profound, changing not only the back office, services, and the range of materials available to users, but also the public face of libraries and the relationship between the library and its users. Within this changed relationship, collaboration, participation, and online social networks play an increasingly important role in the user experience, especially in large university and national libraries. At the same time, a shift is taking place in the type of collection items held in libraries, and the percentage of born-digital materials acquired is increasing on a daily basis. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/ili-2010-rpt/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/ili-2010-rpt/ Thursday 14 OctoberTrack A: Looking Ahead to ValueA102: Future of Academic LibrariesMal Booth, University of Technology Sydney (Australia)Michael Jubb, Research Information Network (UK)Mal Booth from the University of Technology Sydney started the session by giving an insight into current plans and projects underway to inform a new library building due to open in 2015 as part of a major redeveloped city campus. As this new building should be able to respond to demands for many years to come, Mal emphasised how important it is to consider the future users as well as library and technology developments. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/repos-fringe-2010-rpt/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/repos-fringe-2010-rpt/ 2010 was the third year of Repository Fringe, and slightly more formally organised than its antecedents, with an increased number of discursive presentations and less in the way of organised chaos! The proceedings began on Wednesday 1 September with a one-day, pre-event SHERPA/RoMEO API Workshop [1] run by the Repositories Support Project team. 2 September 2010Opening the event proper on Thursday morning, Sheila Cannell, Director of Library Services, University of Edinburgh, used the imminent Edinburgh festival fireworks as a metaphor for the repository development endeavour. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/leech/ Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/leech/ Did you know that: Of the Generation Y – the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s – 96% are members of a social networkThere are some 200 million blogs on the World Wide WebOne in eight couples who married in the USA in 2009 met over the InternetIf Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest by population in the world after China, the USA and IndiaAll the statistics emanate from Socialnomics [1]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/emtacl10-rpt/ Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/emtacl10-rpt/ The emerging technologies in academic libraries (or emtac10) [1] conference was held from 26 - 28 April 2010 at the Rica Nidelven Hotel in Trondheim – winners of “Norges beste frokost” (Norway’s Best Breakfast) for 5 years running, as the sign proudly states outside the hotel. They certainly fed us copious amounts of fantastic food, and had evening functions including an organ recital in the impressive cathedral, but what about the contents of the conference itself? http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/iwmw-2010-rpt/ Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/iwmw-2010-rpt/ This was the 13th Institutional Web Management Workshop [1] to be organised by UKOLN [2] held at the University of Sheffield from 12 to 14 July 2010. The theme was 'The Web in Turbulent Times' [3]. As such, there was a healthy balance of glass-half-empty-doom-and-gloom, and glass-half-full-yes-we-can. More detailed reporting, including live blogging by Kirsty McGill of T Consult Ltd [4] and blog posts by presenters, can be found at the IWMW Blog [5]. 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/nogueira/ Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/63/nogueira/ Archives are using Web 2.0 applications in a context that allows for new types of interaction, new opportunities regarding institutional promotion, new ways of providing their services and making their heritage known to the community. Applications such as Facebook (online social network), Flickr (online image-sharing community) and YouTube (online video sharing community) are already used by cultural organisations that interact in the informal context of Web 2.0. In this article I aim to describe how Web 2. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/63/day-rvw/ Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/63/day-rvw/ Until it joined with the Library Association in 2002 to form the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), the Institute of Information Scientists was a professional organisation for those primarily working in scientific and technical information work. The chapters in this volume were first published in 2008 as a special issue of the Journal of Information Science to commemorate the founding of the institute in 1958. In accordance with this, many of the chapters provide a retrospective - sometimes even anecdotal - overview of developments in information science in the UK since the 1950s. 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/white/ Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/white/ According to Dante in his Divine Comedy the inscription above the door to Hades reads "Abandon hope all ye who enter here". For many this could also be the sign on the home page of their organisation's intranet as, with business-critical decisions to make, they begin the daily hunt for information that they are sure should be somewhere in the application. It could just as easily be the sign on the door of the intranet manager of the organisation, though this door usually also carries a number of other job descriptions, all of which seem to be given more priority by the organisation than the care and development of the intranet. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/davis/ Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/davis/ It seems fair to say that the lion’s share of work on developing online tools for reference and citation management by students and researchers has focused on familiar types of publication. They generally comprise resources that can be neatly and discretely bound in the covers of a book or journal, or their electronic analogues, like the Portable Document Format (PDF): objects in established library or database systems, with ISBNs and ISSNs underwritten by the authority of formal publication and legal deposit. 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/61/cliff-rvw/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/cliff-rvw/ Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) programming technique enables one to update parts of a Web site without reloading the entire page. So useful is it that AJAX is turning up all over the Web, including on my own Web-based archival interfaces; so it was timely that I should be asked to review Ajax in Oracle JDeveloper. Before diving into the book, I should say a little about Oracle's Integrated Development Environment (IDE) JDeveloper [1]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/coelho-rvw/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/coelho-rvw/ The 16 chapters of this book focus on different aspects of the technological and societal changes that interact to shape our institutions. Some pieces read as manifestos, some are polemical, some are technical. But there is something for everyone who is interested in the future of libraries. This work asserts that, in order to succeed, whilst re-inventing ourselves and our presence, we have to remain true to the basic principles of librarianship. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/search-engines/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/search-engines/ There’s a lot of talk going around at the moment on the subject of ‘real-time search’, so I thought it might be useful to look at the concept in a little more detail, and to explore some of the search engines that say they offer it. This is by no means an attempt at a comprehensive listing, as new search engines are appearing if not daily, then certainly every week. Rather, it’s an attempt to define the area, using examples, and to point to some of the functionality that users can and should expect to find when exploring these engines themselves. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/60/chapman-russell/ Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/60/chapman-russell/ Although JISC [1] has developed a number of services, (e.g. JORUM [2], JISCmail [3]) specifically for use by the UK Higher Education (HE) sector, people within the sector are increasingly using services developed outside the sector, either in addition to - or in some cases instead of – JISC-provided services. And as well as using such services, people are also engaging in ‘mashups’ where combinations of services and content are used to provide new services or to provide added value to data already held. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/green-awre/ Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/green-awre/ This article describes the recently completed REMAP Project undertaken at the University of Hull, which has been a key step toward realising a larger vision of the role a repository can play in supporting digital content management for an institution. The first step was the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded RepoMMan Project that the team undertook between 2005 and 2007 [1]. RepoMMan was described at length in Ariadne Issue 54 (January 2008) [2] and will only be dealt with in summary here. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/58/newsline/ Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/58/newsline/ JISC Digital Media (formerly TASI) Training ScheduleFour brand new courses are on offer for the 2009 season dealing with: Finding free images onlineEditing and managing images using Photoshop Lightroom 2Audio Production (recording lectures, seminars, interviews and podcasts)Digitising analogue video recordings.Courses are already filling up fast and several courses now have multiple dates to accommodate demand. Spring 2009 Programme:10 March 2009 Introduction to Photoshop Lightroom 2 http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training-photoshop-lightroom.html 19 March 2009 Copyright and Digital Images http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/58/jisc-dev8d-rpt/ Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/58/jisc-dev8d-rpt/ Firstly some background as to why dev8D came about. David Flanders (JISC) and Ben O'Steen (Oxford University Library Services) over the years have attended many conferences: what they found were that the places and talks from which they benefited most were outside the programmed seminars and presentations. It was during conversations between sessions at these events with other developers, managers, delegates that they felt learned most. For David and Ben the real benefit of these events were derived from the backchannel, the fringe events and random conversations. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/search-engines/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/search-engines/ If we are to believe everything that we read about social media and user-created content, it’s reasonable to assume that there’s a lot of it out there. People are busy twittering away, creating bookmarked content, creating their own pagecasts in Pageflakes – to say nothing of writing about anything and everything in their weblogs. Yet at first glance it might appear to the casual observer that very little of this is being indexed, sorted and made available for searching. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/levan-rvw/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/levan-rvw/ Raymond Yee has produced a comprehensive book on how to consume and repurpose Web services, even for Web sites that do not intentionally expose Web services. The book is broken into four sections; understanding how to use Web content, understanding Web services, combining the data from multiple services (mashups) and detailed examples of specific mashup opportunities. Web Services are a complicated topic and this book does an excellent job of describing how to use them. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/jisc-powr-2008-09-rpt/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/jisc-powr-2008-09-rpt/ The Web is where you go to find out what is happening now, it is, or should be, where the most up to date information about a topic, company or institution is to be found. Every day more and more information is added to existing Web sites and new ones appear at a frightening pace. Having all this information at our fingertips is undoubtedly a good thing but there is also a downside: more information means that it is increasingly difficult to find the bits that are relevant to you, and often the new information simply replaces what was there before. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/davies/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/davies/ Europeana - the European digital library, museum and archive - is a two-year project that began in July 2007. It will produce a service giving users direct access initially to some two million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers, rising to a target of 10 million by 2010. The development of the Europeana service is a flagship activity of the European Digital Libraries Initiative [1] [2], designed to increase access to digital content across four identified key domains (libraries, museums, archives and audio/visual archives) is now gaining momentum. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/guy/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/guy/ Introduction: A New Way of Working In the 21st Century work has changed. Remote working or teleworking [1] is an employment arrangement in which employees can complete their work from a location other than their office base, be it their home, a sub-office or even the local coffee shop. As Woody Leonhard puts it in the Underground Guide to Telecommuting, “Work is becoming something you do, not a place you go to. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/houghton-jan/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/houghton-jan/ What is information overload? 27 instant messages. 4 text messages. 17 phone calls. 98 work emails. 52 personal emails. 76 email listserv messages. 14 social network messages. 127 social network status updates. 825 RSS feed updates. 30 pages from a book. 5 letters. 11 pieces of junk mail. 1 periodical issue. 3 hours of radio. 1 hour of television. That, my friends, is information overload. It is also my daily average amount of information received, sampled over a two-week period. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/editorial/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/editorial/ I am greatly indebted to Gráinne Conole for a number of reasons. It has been my intention for some time to commission something from the OU in respect of learning technologies given the wealth of expertise that resides there. For a variety of reasons it has taken me a while, but the wait has been more than worthwhile in the light of Gráinne's contribution. In my view her article New Schemas for Mapping Pedagogies and Technologies does much to exchange light for all the ambient heat that surrounds this topic, while refusing, as some are tempted, to reject the whole Web 2. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/iwmw-2008-rpt/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/iwmw-2008-rpt/ 'Aberdeen??!! Make sure you take some woolly jumpers and a sou'wester then.' Friends are always keen to give helpful advice, bless 'em, but as it turned out, it was a good job that I ignored it, as it was t-shirts every day for the 180 or so who had the privilege of attending the Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) in the Granite City this year. Three days of glorious sunshine, mixed with stimulating talks, thought-provoking parallel sessions, lively BarCamps, good food and interesting company made for a combination that's hard to beat, despite the allocated (Hillhead) accommodation crying out for an urgent and intimate encounter with a wrecking ball * and the seagulls being on a mission to wake me up by 4. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/newsline/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/newsline/ Minding the Skills Gap: A Workshop for Key Training ProvidersLeeds University Business School 3 September 2008 Over the last few years, researchers have enthusiastically embraced new technologies and services that allow them to discover, locate, gain access to and create information resources on their desktops. Yet there is evidence to suggest that their research information skills and competencies have not kept up with the rapid pace of change. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/ukmw08-rpt/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/ukmw08-rpt/ Following the success of the inaugural event last year [1], the Mashed Museum day was again held the day before the Museums Computer Group UK Museums on the Web Conference. The theme of the conference was 'connecting collections online', and the Mashed Museum day was a chance for museum ICT staff to put this into practice. The Mashed Museum DayEarlier this year I received an email that read: You are invited to a day of coding, thinking and idea sharing with a select group of museum colleagues. 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/coelho-rvw/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/coelho-rvw/ This is a book about public libraries. I might sound disappointed in saying that, in fact I was surprised. Having spent my working life in specialist libraries, I know little about the public library sector and was slightly afraid that what I would find would be irrelevant or uninteresting. But I soon discovered that this was to be one of the most exciting professional texts I'd read for some time. It turns out that you can learn a lot about good practice from any successful library, irrespective of who its users are because what matters is dreams, commitment and courage. 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/55/joyce-et-al/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/joyce-et-al/ The evolution of the Web has changed the way that people access information. Web 2.0 technologies have allowed information providers to integrate their services in people's existing online spaces, and users expect to be able to synthesise, edit and customise content for their own specific purposes. Intute, the JISC-funded service that aims to offer the best of the Web for Higher and Further Education, has responded to these changes by developing a variety of integration services which offer flexible ways of delivering its content to users. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/jisc-debates-rpt/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/jisc-debates-rpt/ As part of its new Libraries of the Future programme [1], JISC held three events during its annual conference in Birmingham to explore some of the questions facing libraries today: in an information world in which Google apparently offers us everything, what place is there for the traditional, and even the digital, library? In a library environment which is increasingly moving to the delivery of online rather than print resources, what of the academic library’s traditional place at the heart of campus life? http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/lilac-2008-rpt/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/lilac-2008-rpt/ The LILAC 2008 has already received plenty of Web coverage, notably in Sheila Webber’s IL blog [1], where lots of other weblog posts on the event have been collected. I also produced an official blog [2] myself, as part of the conditions of my student award conference bursary. As a newcomer to the information and library profession, and a postgraduate masters student, I hope to offer a different perspective on this event, focussing on the highlights and my personal impressions. 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/54/newsline/ Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/newsline/ UkeiG Course: Information Law for Information ProfessionalsInformation Law for Information Professionals: What you need to know about Copyright, Data Protection, Freedom of Information and Accessibility and Disability Discrimination Laws CILIP, 7 Ridgmount Street, London, WC1E 7AE 19 February 2008, 9.30-16.30 Course outline In particular, four key legal areas currently affect the work of many information professionals in the digital environment - copyright, data protection, freedom of information, and disability discrimination and accessibility. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/aharony/ Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/aharony/ Library and information science (LIS) programmes prepare students for performing traditional information tasks such as indexing, retrieval and library management [1][2][3]. The increased importance and centrality of information has moved LIS schools to offer new curricula that combine traditional librarianship and archiving with technological and social aspects of information. As the author has a considerable interest in both LIS education and in Web 2.0 applications, and because she found out that in her own country (Israel) only a limited emphasis is given to adapting Web 2. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/cliff-rvw/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/cliff-rvw/ Principles of Data Management might not sound like a thrilling title and, given its business focus, you might think not all that relevant to many readers of Ariadne. However, before dismissing it out of hand, consider this: may not the research outputs of an institution be regarded as business assets that require management (in, for example, an institutional repository)? On what other data does a university rely? Staffing, recruitment, enrolment, courses, library stock, costs? http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/newsline/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/newsline/ TASI Workshops in November & DecemberThere are currently places available on the following Nov/Dec workshops: 14 November 2007: Image Capture - Level 3, Bristol15 November 2007: Introduction to Image Metadata, Bristol23 November 2007: Image Optimisation - Correcting and Preparing Images, Bristol30 November 2007: Building a Departmental Image Collection, Bristol4 December 2007: Colour Management, Bristol13 December 2007: Photoshop - Level 1, Bristol14 December 2007: Photoshop - Level 2, BristolFull details of these and all TASI workshops are available from the Training page http://www. 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/52/pratty/ Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/52/pratty/ 24 Hour Museum [1] is a successful and sustainable cultural Web site. Type the word 'museum' into Google UK and up it pops as a top five search result. Unlike the other top sites, all national museums or galleries, 24HM's remit covers the whole country, in eclectic subject areas, reaching a wide variety of audiences with simple and accessible content. In 2006 24HM reached ten million visits in the year. 2007 sees the site reaching a million visitors a month, from home to office, schoolroom to museum. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/52/blogging-backroom-rpt/ Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/52/blogging-backroom-rpt/ Blogging and the use of wikis and RSS feeds can seem daunting to many library and information professionals who are now encountering them for the first time. People think ‘Surely blogs are just online diaries?’ and ‘What use are wikis and RSS feeds really, aren’t they just for the ‘techies’?’ Then there’s the ‘I’m scared, it’s all too technical for me.’ And finally ‘Is it really ‘work’?’ and ‘Will my employer see it as ‘work’? http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/52/wallace-et-al/ Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/52/wallace-et-al/ At Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) the Spoken Word [1], a project in the JISC / NSF Digital Libraries in the Classroom (DLiC) programme [2], was conceived in 2001-2002 in response to a set of pedagogical and institutional imperatives. A small group of social scientists had, since the 1990s, been promoting the idea of using 'an information technology-intensive learning environment' to recapture some of the traditional aspirations of Scottish Higher Education, in particular independent, critical and co-operative learning [3]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/52/knight/ Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/52/knight/ Background: Identifying a Need SPP phase I [1] was largely devoted to considering how five Resource Discovery Network (RDN) hubs might be turned into subject portals, but at this stage did not include the development of portlets. During the course of phase I it became clear that many potential users of these portals would choose to access content from within their local institutional portal or a virtual learning environment (VLE). The choice of functionality for these portlets was in part determined by the results of user testing on users of the BIOME Web site, which gathered feedback about various potential portlets and the ways in which they might deliver information [2]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/jones-rvw/ Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/jones-rvw/ At the time of review, Amazon UK had over fifty different titles for sale on weblogs and RSS feeds. How do you choose which to read? When faced with a new technology or service, it's useful to have instruction designed specifically with you in mind as the reader and learner. In 'Blogging and RSS: A Librarian's Guide', Michael Sauers does exactly that and pitches directly to a specific audience. Those interested in this book will presumably be librarians and information professionals and will probably already have an idea of what a blog is, and some knowledge of RSS feeds. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/emamy-cameron/ Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/emamy-cameron/ This article describes Citeulike, a fusion of Web-based social bookmarking services and traditional bibliographic management tools. It discusses how Citeulike turns the linear ‘gather, collect, share’ process inherent in academic research into a circular ‘gather, collect, share and network’ process, enabling the sharing and discovery of academic literature and research papers. What is Citeulike?Citeulike is a Web-based tool to help scientists, researchers and academics store, organise, share and discover links to academic research papers. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/editorial/ Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/editorial/ Having emerged from the political arguments of the 1990s about what culture could be funded and whether it was better to fund soccer or opera, we have moved into an age where, in the UK at least, there are arguments as to what actually constitutes British culture. Fortunately more people are deciding to do culture for themselves than remain passive witnesses to the pundits' debate. The place where they are doing it is online and they are not waiting to see whether their offering attracts the experts' approval - and sometimes, admittedly, one might argue more's the pity. 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/51/search-engines/ Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/search-engines/ Since I spend the majority of my time looking at new search engines it’s very easy to ignore what’s happening with the existing ones, and particularly those engines that sometimes seem to have been around forever. For this column I thought that I’d try and correct that imbalance, and take a look in a little more detail at one of the ‘big four’ - Ask [1], and see what’s been happening with it. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/foggo/ Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/foggo/ This case study shows how students were taught the skills they need to find information relevant to their subject area. As groups of students are generally seen once only, measures to assess the effectiveness of teaching are needed, i.e. to determine the skills the students have acquired. Blogs were used as a tool for formative assessment and were used to measure student expectations before teaching, and their level of satisfaction with the session afterwards. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/awre-rvw/ Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/awre-rvw/ We are not short of information on digital libraries and the technologies involved in building them. There have been multiple papers in many journals, of which Ariadne itself is key, many books and, now, many blogs enthusiastically informing us of the technical directions it is best to take. Nevertheless the constant evolution of available technologies, makes book publishing in the field a tricky business, risking irrelevance prior to release. However, it is valuable to be able to place markers along the evolutionary way and recognise the technical approaches that can be consolidated and built upon with an assurance that they will be around for some time to come. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/newsline/ Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/newsline/ Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) Training Programme Either: Birmingham, Bristol or London, 8 February to 27 April 2007 http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/ The TASI programme of practical hands-on training includes three brand new workshops: Digital Photography - Level 2 Provides an introduction to the effective operation of a digital SLR, explaining how the camera's manual controls can be used to improve photography. The course also explains how to illuminate small 2D and 3D objects using tungsten studio lights. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/eprints-v3-rpt/ Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/eprints-v3-rpt/ The EPrints 3 unwrapped event at the Congress Centre in London was billed as ‘an early Christmas present’ [1] and was an opportunity for the EPrints community to enjoy a preview of EPrints 3 (hereafter referred to as EP3) scheduled for release at the end of January 2007. The official launch was held at the Open Repositories Conference [2] in San Antonio, Texas on the 24th of January and the software is now in final release. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/search-engines/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/search-engines/ I’m sure that there must be some sort of wise old saying along the lines of ‘the loudest noise starts with the quietest whisper’. This is something that I’m experiencing a lot at the moment - as I spend time on the Internet, or teaching, or even just talking to people I’m beginning to hear a little whisper along the lines of ‘What’s up with Google these days?’ This is not a line from the experts - it’s just ordinary people who are beginning to wonder if Google is… well - running out of steam. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/guy/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/guy/ In February of this year an article was published by Steven Andrew Mathieson in Guardian Unlimited on public sector wikis [1]. Mathieson proclaimed the rise in creation and use of wikis by UK state sector organisations. This article will look objectively at this apparent rise and will consider whether wikimania has truly hit the public sector. Setting the Scene In the Web 2.0 world those of us working with the Web now live, there is an increasing awareness of changing audiences and expectations. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/escience-lancaster-rpt/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/escience-lancaster-rpt/ This workshop was held at the University of Lancaster Centre for e-Science. The organisers were Rob Crouchley, Rob Allan and Caroline Ingram, there were 17 other attendees. The main aim of this workshop was to explore the relationship between digital repositories, e-Research and Portals in the UK with a view to discovering e-infrastructure gaps and articulating requirements. The hosts had been commissioned by JISC to undertake the ITT: JISC Information Environment Portal activity - supporting the needs of e-Research [1]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/whalley/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/whalley/ Although they were not called e-books at the time, Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg started digitising existing print on paper editions for public access in the 1970s. Since then, the term e-book has come to have a variety of meanings and related concepts. Here I want to explore the direction associated with my day job as a researcher and teacher within the UK Higher Education system. My viewpoint may thus be somewhat idiosyncratic compared to Ariadne’s normal clientele but I am particularly interested in the information technologist’s role as an intermediary between academic author and student reader. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/search-engines/ Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/search-engines/ I thought that it was about time to take an in-depth peek at a specific search engine again, since many of my recent columns have looked rather more broadly at the search engine industry. I decided that I would take a look at Accoona since I have seen a few mentions of it recently, it launched a European version at the end of June 2006, and having played around with it myself for a while I have been rather impressed with it. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/coelho-rvw/ Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/coelho-rvw/ I never read a book twice, but when I was asked to review the second edition of The Librarian's Internet Survival Guide, I welcomed the chance, as I was reminded why I'd loved this book so much when I first reviewed it in 2003. This expanded and updated edition should be at every reference desk as it is not only a useful guide to quality resources but also a motivational tool for librarians everywhere. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/iwmw-2006-rpt/ Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/iwmw-2006-rpt/ The 10th Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2006) [1] returned to its spiritual home in Bath this year, headquarters of the workshop organisers UKOLN [2] and the venue of the fourth IWMW workshop held in 2000. It was the first workshop to be chaired by Marieke Guy following nine years with Brian Kelly at the helm from its inception in 1997. This year the workshop theme was 'Quality Matters', reflecting the fact that institutional Web sites have been around for over ten years and are now taken as a given. 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/48/murray/ Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/murray/ The role of the integrated library system is, and always has been, to help manage the effective delivery of library services. This has traditionally been anchored on the management of the catalogue and physical collection. The core business and service model could be described as ‘Acquire - Catalogue - Circulate’. This is increasingly no longer the case. While the physical collection remains a critical aspect of the library service, it is just one of a number of ‘atomic’ or ‘granular’ services presented by the library. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/dempsey/ Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/dempsey/ The catalogue [Note 1] has always been an important focus of library discussion; its construction and production are a central part of historical library practice and identity. In recent months, the future of the catalogue has become a major topic of debate, prompted by several new initiatives and by a growing sense that it has to evolve to meet user needs [1][2]. Much of the discussion is about improving the catalogue user’s experience, not an unreasonable aspiration. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/newsline/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/newsline/ Oxford Journals to report on its open access experiments Oxford Journals is to stage a one-day conference to report new results from its open access experiments. Conference details: Monday 5 June 10.30-16.30 76 Portland Place, London, W1B 1NT Preliminary programme: Martin Richardson and Claire Saxby, Oxford Journals, Oxford University Press Oxford Journals and Open Access Claire Creaser and Eric Davies, LISU, Loughborough University: Counting on Open Access - Preliminary Outcomes of an Experiment in Evaluating Scholarly Journal Open Access Models 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/46/dempsey/ Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/dempsey/ We have recently come through several decennial celebrations: the W3C, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, D-Lib Magazine, and now Ariadne. What happened clearly in the mid-nineties was the convergence of the Web with more pervasive network connectivity, and this made our sense of the network as a shared space for research and learning, work and play, a more real and apparently achievable goal. What also emerged - at least in the library and research domains - was a sense that it was also a propitious time for digital libraries to move from niche to central role as part of the information infrastructure of this new shared space. 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/45/notay/ Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/notay/ There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that people learn better when visual and sound materials are used in a teaching context. Researchers from a range of disciplines have also suggested that visual materials are of great value either as a core focus or to support the research process. For example, studies looking at the effect of visual materials in education have explored how both short-term and long-term memory is associated with the different hemispheres of the brain, but also which kind of information is best retained through the use of images. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/web-focus/ Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/web-focus/ The ILI 2005 ConferenceThe ILI (Internet Librarian International) 2005 Conference [1], the seventh in the series, was held in the Copthorne Tara Hotel, London over 10-11 September 2005. This conference is aimed at information professionals and librarians who are using, developing and implementing Internet, Intranet and Web-based services in their daily work. One of the main themes at the conference explored at the conference was the potential for technologies such as Blogs and Wikis within a library context. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/iwmw2005-rpt/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/iwmw2005-rpt/ The 9th Institutional Web Management Workshop [1], a three-day event held at the Manchester Conference Centre [2], Manchester University [3], UK, 6-8 July 2005 had as its theme this year 'Whose web is it anyway?'. How apt at a time when we are all continuing to attempt delivery of systems and services to meet users' needs and requirements within institutional demands and pressures on resource. The format this year was six plenary sessions, two parallel workshop slots, two sessions for regional groups to discuss Content Management Systems (CMS), two panel sessions and one slot for delegates to attend an extra discussion session or look round the poster displays/vendor stalls. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/trafford/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/trafford/ Public participation in the Internet has continued to boom, aided in no small measure by the 'weblog' (or, simply, 'blog'), one of the most accessible means of online publication, a term that is rapidly entering common parlance. Blogs are authored by people from many walks of life and are of many kinds: for instance, Penny Garrod has shown how they can support reading groups and community links, such as news from local councillors [1]. 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/44/web-focus/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/web-focus/ About the WWW 2005 ConferenceThe WWW 2005 Conference was held in the Nippon Conference Centre in Chiba, Japan over 10-14 May 2005. This conference is the main event for the Web research community and provides an opportunity for researchers to present papers on research into developments in the Web infrastructure. In addition to its role for the research community, the conference also attracts delegates who are active in leading edge work in more mainstream areas. 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/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/planet-sosig/ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/planet-sosig/ ESRC Launches Unique Online Research Resource for Social SciencesA major new Web site offering unrivalled access to high-quality social and economic research is soon to be launched in the UK. Created by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), ESRC Society Today [1] will provide academics, students and researchers with a valuable free digest of social sciences research currently available, planned and in progress. As well as bringing together all ESRC-funded research, the Web site will provide a gateway to other key online resources from the UK such as Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG), the UK Data Archive and the Office of National Statistics - as well as international coverage from services such as Europa and Social Science Research Network (SSRN). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/42/beyond-email-rpt/ Sun, 30 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/42/beyond-email-rpt/ Many working in Higher Education are now thoroughly familiar with the particular problems and opportunities presented by the use of the Web and email, the applications that up to now have been the 'killer' applications which made the Internet such a vital part of the communications armoury of universities. However, new applications and ways of communicating are now starting to appear which push the accepted paradigms and demand both new perceptions and levels of technical awareness. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/42/tonkin/ Sun, 30 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/42/tonkin/ Introduction: What is a Wiki?Software use cases are necessarily incomplete, a failing which seems to intensify in reverse proportion to the degree of simplicity in the software in question. Complex software responds to a given set of requirements, simple software as a partial solution to a much broader problem set. More concisely put, certain ideas just seem to catch on, particularly the simple, brilliant, ‘now why didn’t I think of that’ class of ideas. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/eevl/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/eevl/ New Sustainable Development section added to the EEVL Catalogue of Engineering ResourcesIt is now tacitly recognised that engineers, across all sectors of engineering, play an important role in shaping our environment and therefore have a professional responsibility towards ensuring sustainable development. Sustainable development, defined by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) as ‘Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ has been integrated in most engineering curricula throughout the nation. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/davey/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/davey/ JISC currently funds thirty-four services across the UK. These can be divided into Network Services (e.g. JANET), Content Services (e.g. BizEd, BUFVC), Development Services (e.g. TechWatch, UKOLN), Support Services (e.g. Regional Support Centres) and Expert Services (e.g. JISC Legal). The people and communities that they serve are varied, but what unites them is that, through JISC-funding, they all carry out some function which supports the needs of UK Further and Higher Education and research. 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/40/morgan/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/morgan/ This article is an introduction to the "brother and sister" Web Service protocols named Search/Retrieve Web Service (SRW) and Search/Retrieve URL Service (SRU) with an emphasis on the later. More specifically, the article outlines the problems SRW/U are intended to solve, the similarities and differences between SRW and SRU, the complimentary nature of the protocols with OAI-PMH, and how SRU is being employed in a sponsored NSF (National Science Foundation) grant called OCKHAM to facilitate an alerting service. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/young-rvw/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/young-rvw/ Marylaine Block will be well-known to many readers of Ariadne - perhaps chiefly for her 'Neat New Stuff' and ExLibris bulletins. As its name suggests, 'Neat New Stuff' is a weekly compilation of noteworthy sites Block has discovered in her Web crawling. Her other weekly online publication, ExLibris, is an 'e-zine' containing interesting and provocative articles, reviews and tidbits of information from Block and others. If you were setting out to do this kind of current awareness- and consciousness-raising these days, you'd probably choose to set up a blog with RSS feed. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/biome/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/biome/ BIOME Database Continues to IncreaseThe BIOME database [1] now contains over 25,000 resources and continues to grow. To see the weekly additions go to BIOME what’s new [2]. BIOME Straight to your DesktopBIOME has been making lots of changes to its Web site. With the help of Vicky Wiseman, our Portal Development Officer, a new feature added to the site is an RSS newsfeed of the latest headlines form BIOME. RSS allows news headlines to be shared between different Web sites; they can be embedded directly into your own or you institutional Web page very simply. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/public-libraries/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/public-libraries/ Weblogs in EducationWeblogs and weblogging, blogs and blogging - many terms are used to describe this increasingly popular Web-based activity, but is a library Web site the right place to host a weblog? Are weblogs simply another trendy tool for those with time to spare and something to say? Consider this from the BBC news Web site: ‘Weblogs are sometimes criticised for being the self-obsessed ramblings of people who have little to say and too much time on their hands in which to do it. 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/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/eevl/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/eevl/ EEVL is the Internet guide to Engineering, Mathematics and Computing. It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet. It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University. EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in Higher and Further Education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing. 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/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/38/eevl/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/eevl/ "Indispensible, much better than using Google" was a comment about EEVL, the Internet guide to engineering, mathematics and computing, from one FE Tutor who attended an RSC (Regional Support Centre) event last year. It is not surprising that he was enthusiastic as there is a great deal of content in EEVL of interest to staff and students in Further Education (FE). In fact, EEVL has a surprisingly wide appeal, as was recognised recently by Schoolzone, a service which features Web sites reviewed by UK teachers. 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/37/eevl/ Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/eevl/ EEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing. It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet. It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University. EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/editorial/ Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/editorial/ These days zoologists view with increasing alarm the disappearance of species in this world, to the point where they fear their extinction will predate their discovery. This is no less true for linguists who are witnessing the same phenomenon in terms of dying languages and dialects. A parallel therefore can be drawn with the situation as detailed by Deborah Anderson. She is most concerned by the progress made by historic scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphs towards inclusion in the Unicode Standard and fears that unless efforts in this area are maintained, certain historic scripts may fall into the abyss, being denied exposure to the many through the enormous access afforded by the Internet. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/miller/ Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/miller/ Regular readers of Ariadne and related publications possibly feel more than a little overwhelmed by the current deluge of portal-related literature; a deluge for which my colleagues and I on the PORTAL Project [1] must of course accept some responsibility. Nevertheless, with Gartner and others pointing to continued interest in enterprise portals amongst the business community, the headlong rush to ‘portalise’ everything from the Post Office to the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), and figures from the Campus Computing Project [2] suggesting that over 40% of US universities either had or were building an institutional portal in 2002, the portal in its various forms is clearly going to be with us for a while! http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/eevl/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/eevl/ EEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing. It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet. It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University. EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/justadist/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/justadist/ The PORTAL Project [1], funded under the JISC’s Focus on Access to Institutional Resources, (FAIR) Programme [2], aims to explore a range of issues relating to the deployment of institutional portals within the UK tertiary education sector [3]. In issue 35 [4], Liz Pearce discussed the ‘Stakeholder Requirements for Institutional Portals’ report [5] which formed Work Package 3 of the project. Building on both the data and the analysis of Work Package 3, the recently published report ‘Stakeholder Requirements for External Content in Institutional Portals’ [6] focuses on the issues surrounding the inclusion of external resources within institutional portals. 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/35/pearce/ Tue, 29 Apr 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/pearce/ The PORTAL Project [1], funded under the JISC's FAIR Programme, aims to explore a range of issues relating to the deployment of institutional portals within the UK tertiary education sector. An introduction to the PORTAL Project was provided by Ian Dolphin, Paul Miller and Robert Sherratt in Ariadne Issue 33 [2]. The project began in September 2002 and work is well underway on the project's diverse work packages. Work Package 6, 'Standards for the Description of Portal Users', is now available [3] and both technical and research work is ongoing. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/planet-sosig/ Tue, 29 Apr 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/planet-sosig/ SOSIG and LTSN Collaboration ProjectOn March 11th, representatives from the social science-related LTSN Subject Centres sat down with SOSIG staff to kick off a collaboration project that has the grand goal of maximising the use of Internet resource descriptions and information created for the UK social science community by sharing cataloguing responsibilities and tasks. LTSN subject centres have a central aim of following and supporting lecturer’s needs within higher education and within the specialised subject areas that they cover. 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/34/eevl/ Wed, 15 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/eevl/ BackgroundEEVL is the Internet guide for engineering, mathematics and computing. It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet. It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University. EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/public-libraries/ Wed, 15 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/public-libraries/ Background to the workshopThe third Public Library Web Managers workshop to be organised by UKOLN was held at the University of Bath on the 5th and 6th of November 2002. This year’s event aimed to provide public library web managers with a brief respite from the trials and tribulations of the workplace, and the chance to share networking experiences with colleagues up and down the country. It also aimed to bring together some key speakers on this year’s hot topic –e-government (electronic government). 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/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/portals/ Wed, 09 Oct 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/portals/ Judging by the number of articles written and conferences organised around them, portals are undoubtedly a hot topic in higher education, and seem likely to remain so for some time to come. This article reports on two portal-focussed conferences held in Canada and the UK during the summer of 2002. It also introduces some of the work underway at Hull to build an institutional portal, and the way in which a JISC-funded project shared between Hull and UKOLN will demonstrate the role of institutional portals in bringing resources provided by the JISC and others to the attention of those working within an institution. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/netlab-history/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/netlab-history/ Actually, that was really the way it was: a cake for the consumption of a group of people interested in the development of digital libraries. It was in 1991, long before this concept had been implanted into the heart of the library community. Indeed long before most people knew about the Internet. At this meeting the first seed for what was going to be NetLab [1] was sown - the multidisciplinary research- and developmental group aimed at digital libraries and global network based information systems. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/eevl/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/eevl/ BackgroundEEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing. It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet. It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University. EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/netlab-conference/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/netlab-conference/ Every future must have a pastHow did you celebrate your tenth birthday? Perhaps by making a nice birthday cake with all your favourite ingredients to share with your friends? NetLab [1], the research and development department at Lund University Libraries [2], celebrated its tenth anniversary in April 2002 with a three-day conference in Lund, Sweden [3]. This gâteau consisted of topics on digital library development, divided into five pieces: “Semantic web and knowledge organisation”; “Interoperability and integration of heterogeneous sources”; “Visions, future issues and current development”; “The Nordic situation”; and the surprise session “Tension between visions and reality”. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/information-grid/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/information-grid/ Many of the issues faced by the e-Science Programme and the Digital Library community world-wide are generic in nature, in that both require complex metadata in order to create services for users. Both need to process large amounts of distributed data. Recognition of this common interest within both communities resulted in this invitation-only one-day workshop at the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh. It brought together interested parties from both the digital library and e-Science communities, and kicked off detailed discussion of the way forward for both. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/web-focus/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/web-focus/ The Institutional Web Management Workshop series is the main event organised by UK Web Focus. The workshop series began with a two-day event at King's College London in June 1997. The event has been repeated every year since then and, after the first event, was extended to a three-day format. Overview Of This Year's EventThis year's event was held at the University of Strathclyde. The full title of the workshop was " http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/eevl/ Wed, 10 Apr 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/eevl/ EEVL is the Hub for engineering, mathematics and computing. It is an award-winning free service, which provides quick and reliable access to the best engineering, mathematics, and computing information available on the Internet. It is created and run by a team of information specialists from a number of universities and institutions in the UK, lead by Heriot Watt University. EEVL helps students, staff and researchers in higher and further education, as well as anyone else working, studying or looking for information in Engineering, Mathematics and Computing. 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/web-focus/ Wed, 10 Apr 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/web-focus/ “Cool URIs”What are “cool URIs”? This term comes from advice provided by W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium). The paper “Cool URIs don’t change” [1] begins by saying: What makes a cool URI?A cool URI is one which does not change.What sorts of URI change?URIs don’t change: people change them.All Web users will, sadly, be familiar with the 404 error message. But, as W3C point out, the 404 error message does not point to a technical failure but a human one - hence the warning: “URIs don’t change: people change them. 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/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/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/planet-sosig/ Thu, 21 Jun 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/planet-sosig/ Virtual Training Suite LaunchedSOSIG is pleased to announce the launch of 9 more free Web-tutorials teaching Internet skills for different social science subjects - ideal for students, lecturers and researchers who want to learn how to get the best from the Web. This brings the total to 16 - with one tutorial for each of the main subjects covered by the gateway (ranging from Anthropology to Women’s Studies). The tutorials give a guided tour of the Web for the subject, with expert “tour guides” from university libraries and national social science organisations. 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/27/web-focus/ Fri, 23 Mar 2001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/27/web-focus/ HTML is Dead?Previous Web Focus articles have reported on developments which have been the featured prominently in International World Wide Web conferences. These include XML, which was the highlight of the Sixth WWW conference in 1997 [1]. Have developments such as this affected mainstream Web services, or are they restricted to the research community? Indeed, wouldn’t it be sensible for HTML authors for mainstream Web services to be still be making use of the same HTML tags (and possibly authoring tools) they mastered several years ago? http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/planet-sosig/ Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/planet-sosig/ Grapevine is the 'people oriented' side of SOSIG, offering the social science community a place to look at and publicise information about events, career development opportunities and professional colleagues. Grapevine began life in 1998 as an ESRC funded pilot project and was brought under the auspices of SOSIG in February 2000 with the launch of the new interface and associated services of the gateway. You can use Grapevine to find: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/app-profiles/ Sat, 23 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/app-profiles/ BackgroundThis paper introduces application profiles as a type of metadata schema. We use application profiles as a way of making sense of the differing relationship that implementors and namespace managers have towards metadata schema, and the different ways they use and develop schema. The idea of application profiles grew out of UKOLN’s work on the DESIRE project (1), and since then has proved so helpful to us in our discussions of schemas and registries that we want to throw it out for wider discussion in the run-up to the DC8 Workshop in Ottawa in October. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/web-focus/ Sat, 23 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/web-focus/ “One of the best workshops I’ve ever been at”“Excellent! One of the best workshops I’ve ever been at“ “I return because it is by far the best way for me to find out what I need to do in the coming year at my site“ “The workshop gets better every year and I never fail to learn something new.“ “A good mixture of web/techie people and communications/PR people. Important to have both for this type of event“As can be seen from the quotes given above the Institutional Web Management workshop was very highly regarded by the workshop delegates. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/web-focus/ Thu, 22 Jun 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/web-focus/ The Ninth International World Wide Web conference (WWW9) was held at the RAI Congress Centre in Amsterdam. The main part of the conference took place from Tuesday 16th till Thursday 18th May. A day of tutorial and workshops was held on Monday 15th May with the Developer's Day on Friday 19th May. About 1,400 delegates attended the conference. It was pleasing to note the large numbers of delegates from the UK - about 100 in total, with about 50% from the Higher Education community (and about 9 people from Southampton University and another 9 from Bristol University).