http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/buzz/widget/ Recent content in Widget on Ariadne Hugo -- gohugo.io en-gb Tue, 16 Jul 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/editorial2/ Tue, 16 Jul 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/editorial2/ As I depart this chair after the preparation of what I thought would be the last issue of Ariadne [1], I make no apology for the fact that I did my best to include as much material  to her ‘swan song’ as possible. With the instruction to produce only one more issue this year, I felt it was important to publish as much of the content in the pipeline as I could. 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/70/codata-2012-rpt/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/codata-2012-rpt/ CODATA was formed by the International Council for Science (ICSU) in 1966 to co-ordinate and harmonise the use of data in science and technology. One of its very earliest decisions was to hold a conference every two years at which new developments could be reported. The first conference was held in Germany in 1968, and over the following years it would be held in  15 different countries across 4 continents. My colleague Monica Duke and I attended the most recent conference in Taipei both to represent the Digital Curation Centre – CODATA's national member for the UK – and to participate in a track of talks on data publication and citation. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/taylor/ Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/taylor/ I’ve been working with repositories in various ways for over five years, so I have, of course, attended the major international conference Open Repositories before. I have never actually presented anything or represented a specific project at the event, though. This year was different. This year I had a mission -  to present a poster on the DataFlow Project [1] and to talk to people about the work we had been doing for the past 12 months and (I hoped) to interest them in using the Open Source (OS) systems we had developed during that period. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/iwmw-2012-rpt/ Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/iwmw-2012-rpt/ The 16th Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 12) took place at the University of Edinburgh's Appleton Tower – a building with a stunning panoramic view over the volcanic city.  The event brought together 172 delegates and attracted an additional 165 viewers to the live video stream of the plenary sessions over the three days. This year's theme focussed on embedding innovation, and the event featured a range of case studies and examples of embedded practice. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/edui-2011-rpt/ Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/edui-2011-rpt/ The third annual edUi Conference [1] was held October 13-14, 2011, in Richmond, Virginia, USA. The sold-out event saw 225 ‘Web professionals serving colleges, universities, libraries, museums, and beyond’ join together to discuss the latest and greatest in Web trends and technologies. The all-volunteer conference was presented by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and major sponsors included Microsoft, the University of Richmond, and Virginia Commonwealth University. The two-day event consisted of four tracks [2]: 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/65/survive-thrive-rpt/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/survive-thrive-rpt/ Survive or Thrive [1] is the punchy title given to an event intended to stimulate serious consideration amongst digital collections practitioners about future directions in our field - opportunities but also potential pitfalls. The event, which focused on content in HE, comes at a time of financial uncertainty when proving value is of increasing importance in the sector and at a point when significant investment has already been made in the UK into content creation, set against a backdrop of increasingly available content on the open Web from a multitude of sources. 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/joyce-et-al/ Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/joyce-et-al/ Increasingly, library and information services are under pressure to demonstrate value for money. Against the backdrop of search engine dominance, economic instability, and rapid technological development, Intute, a JISC-funded free national service which delivers the best of the Web for education and research, is facing reduced funding and an uncertain future. This article will share its successes and achievements, put a spotlight on the human expertise of its contributors and partners, and reflect on lessons learnt in the context of the sustainability of library and information services. 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/51/open-repos-rpt/ Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/open-repos-rpt/ 23-26 January 2007 saw the second Open RepositoriesConference [1], this year hosted at the enormous Marriott Rivercenter Hotel in San Antonio, Texas, around the corner from the Alamo. The conference followed on from the inaugural one held last year in Sydney [2], offering the U.S. repositories community an ideal opportunity to gather, together with a generous scattering of attendees from other parts of the world. With the strap-line 'achieving interoperability in an open world', the conference promoted interoperability and openness in various ways, not just between repositories on a technical level, but also between development communities, technical implementers, librarians and repository managers. 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/47/reese/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/reese/ Surveying the current metasearch tools landscape, it is somewhat surprising to find so few non-commercial implementations available. This is especially true considering that, as a group, the library community has cultivated a very vibrant open source community over the past ten or so years. One wonders then, why this particular service has been ceded to the world of commercial vendors. One can speculate that the creation and management of a metasearch knowledge base has likely played a large role [1]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/browning/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/browning/ The Web is over ten years old but it has yet to realise the vision of its founder - '.... it should be possible for grandma to take a photo of grandchildren and put it on the web immediately and without fuss ....'[1]. The Web, for most of its users, remains a read-only medium. The 'Universal Canvas' is a term introduced by Microsoft; two definitions are [2]: It builds upon XML schema to transform the Internet from a read-only environment into a read/write platform, enabling users to interactively create, browse, edit, annotate and analyze informationA surface on which we view, but also create and edit, words and tables and charts and picturesCentral to the concept of the Universal Canvas is the idea of the write-enabled or 'Two-way-Web' [3]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/search-engines/ Thu, 22 Jun 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/search-engines/ In the courses that I run on Internet searching people often express concern, surprise or plain puzzlement at the way in which search engines relevance rank the results that they return. Consequently, I thought that it might be interesting to cover this subject in the column. Why rank pages? The search engines that are what I call 'free text' search engines will, in general terms, be much more comprehensive than those that provide access to websites via a directory or index.