http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/buzz/xml/ Recent content in Xml on Ariadne Hugo -- gohugo.io en-gb Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/73/henshaw-et-al/ Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/73/henshaw-et-al/ Overview of the UK Medical Heritage Library ProjectThe aim of the UK Medical Heritage Library (UK-MHL) Project is to provide free access to a wealth of medical history and related books from UK research libraries. There are already over 50,000 books and journal issues in the Medical Heritage Library drawn from North American research libraries. The UK-MHL Project will expand this collection considerably by digitising a further 15 million pages for inclusion in the collection. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/73/jenkins/ Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/73/jenkins/ 2013 marked the 10th anniversary of SUNCAT. Back in 2003, SUNCAT (Serials Union CATalogue) started as a project undertaken by EDINA [1] in response to an observed need for better journals information in the UK, which was identified in the UKNUC report [2]. In August 2006, SUNCAT became a full service, and is now an established resource that contains serials records, including more and more e-journals information, of an ever-increasing number of libraries. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/72/ball-fowler/ Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/72/ball-fowler/ The Hartley Library at the University of Southampton has in excess of 15,000 bound PhD and MPhil theses on 340 linear metres of shelving. Consultation of the hard-copy version is now restricted to readers making a personal visit to the Library, as no further microfiche copies are being produced by the British Library and no master copies of theses are lent from the Library. Retrieval of theses from storage for readers and their subsequent return requires effort from a large number of staff. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/72/guy-et-al/ Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/72/guy-et-al/ In the past, discussions around Open Education have tended to focus on content and primarily Open Educational Resources (OER), freely accessible, openly licensed resources that are used for teaching, learning, assessment and research purposes. However Open Education is a complex beast made up of many aspects, of which the opening up of data is one important element. When one mentions open data in education a multitude of questions arise: from the technical (what is open data? http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/rumsey-jefferies/ Mon, 08 Jul 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/rumsey-jefferies/ In 2012 the University of Oxford Research Committee endorsed a university ‘Policy on the management of research data and records’ [1]. Much of the infrastructure to support this policy is being developed under the Jisc-funded Damaro Project [2]. The nascent services that underpin the University’s RDM (research data management) infrastructure have been divided into four themes: RDM planning;managing live data;discovery and location; andaccess, reuse and curation.The data outputs catalogue falls into the third theme, and will result in metadata and interfaces that support discovery, location, citation and business reporting for Oxford research datasets. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/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/kehoe-gee/ Mon, 08 Jul 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/kehoe-gee/ In the Research and Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) at Birmingham City University, our main research field is Corpus Linguistics: the compilation and analysis of large text collections in order to extract new knowledge about language. We have previously developed the WebCorp [1] suite of software tools, designed to extract language examples from the Web and to uncover frequent and changing usage patterns automatically. eMargin, with its emphasis on manual annotation and analysis, was therefore somewhat of a departure for us. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/codata-2012-rpt/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/codata-2012-rpt/ CODATA was formed by the International Council for Science (ICSU) in 1966 to co-ordinate and harmonise the use of data in science and technology. One of its very earliest decisions was to hold a conference every two years at which new developments could be reported. The first conference was held in Germany in 1968, and over the following years it would be held in  15 different countries across 4 continents. My colleague Monica Duke and I attended the most recent conference in Taipei both to represent the Digital Curation Centre – CODATA's national member for the UK – and to participate in a track of talks on data publication and citation. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/editorial/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/editorial/ Welcome to Issue 70 of Ariadne which is full to the brim with feature articles and a wide range of event reports and book reviews. In Gold Open Access: Counting the Costs Theo Andrew explains the significance of the recent RCUK amendment to their Open Access policy requirements of researchers and the importance assumed by the cost of publishing the Gold Open Access route. Unsurprisingly, there is currently a great variability in such costs to research institutions, while, with few exceptions, publishers are as yet slow to impart what effect the move to charging for article processing will have on current institutional subscription costs. 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/70/meehan-et-al/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/meehan-et-al/ A full-scale implementation of the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) would not be possible without the automated data harvesting afforded by the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) protocol. Estimated time savings in excess of 97% compared with manual file handling have allowed JUSP to expand its service to more than 35 publishers and 140 institutions by September 2012. An in-house SUSHI server also allows libraries to download quality-checked data from many publishers via JUSP, removing the need to visit numerous Web sites. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/lyons/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/lyons/ It is indisputable that the use of e-resources in university libraries has increased exponentially over the last decade and there would be little disagreement with a prediction that usage is set to continue to increase for the foreseeable future. The majority of students both at undergraduate and post-graduate level now come from a background where online access is the de facto standard. Add to this the ubiquity of mobile devices in the form of netbooks, tablets and smart phones and it is apparent that a considerable percentage of the service provision from libraries does and will continue to involve on-line resources. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/gartner/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/gartner/ Parliamentary historians in the United Kingdom are particularly fortunate as their key primary source, the record of Parliamentary proceedings, is almost entirely available in digitised form. Similarly, those needing to consult and study contemporary proceedings as scholars, journalists or citizens have access to the daily output of the UK's Parliaments and Assemblies in electronic form shortly after their proceedings take place. Unfortunately, the full potential of this resource for all of these users is limited by the fact that it is scattered throughout a heterogeneous information landscape and so cannot be approached as a unitary resource. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/eurocris-2012-11-rpt/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/eurocris-2012-11-rpt/ euroCRIS membership meetings [1] are held twice a year, providing members and invited participants with updates on strategic and Task Group progress and plans, as well as the opportunity to share experience of Current Research Information System (CRIS)-related developments and seek feedback. A CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) tutorial is usually included on the first morning for those new to the standard, and the host country reports on local CRIS initiatives in the ‘national’ session. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/editorial/ Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/editorial/ Never blessed with any sporting acumen, I have to confess to a degree of ambivalence towards the London Olympics unfolding around this issue as it publishes. That does not mean that I do not wish all the participants well in what after all is an enormous achievement just to be able to compete there at all. While I admit to not watching every team walk and wave, I cannot deny that the beginning and end of the Opening Ceremony [1] did grab my attention. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/jisc-rim-cerif-rpt/ Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/jisc-rim-cerif-rpt/ A workshop on Research Information Management (RIM) and CERIF was held in Bristol on 27-28 June 2012, organised by the Innovation Support Centre [1] at UKOLN, together with the JISC RIM and RCSI (Repositories and Curation Shared Infrastructure) Programmes. It was a follow-up to the CERIF Tutorial and UK Data Surgery [2] held in Bath in February. Workshop Scope and AimsThe aim was to bring together people working on the various elements of the UK RIM jigsaw to share experience of using CERIF and explore ways of working together more closely. 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/69/knight-et-al/ Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/knight-et-al/ The Loughborough Online Reading Lists System (LORLS) [1] has been developed at Loughborough University since the late 1990s.  LORLS was originally implemented at the request of the University’s Learning and Teaching Committee simply to make reading lists available online to students.  The Library staff immediately saw the benefit of such a system in not only allowing students ready access to academics’ reading lists but also in having such access themselves. This was because a significant number of academics were bypassing the library when generating and distributing lists to their students who were then in turn surprised when the library did not have the recommended books either in stock or in sufficient numbers to meet demand. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/callaghan-et-al/ Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/callaghan-et-al/ Data are the foundation upon which scientific progress rests. Historically speaking, data were a scarce resource, but one which was (relatively) easy to publish in hard copy, as tables or graphs in journal papers. With modern scientific methods, and the increased ease in collecting and analysing vast quantities of data, there arises a corresponding difficulty in publishing this data in a form that can be considered part of the scientific record. 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/iassist-2011-rpt/ Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/iassist-2011-rpt/ The IASSIST [1] Conference is a long-standing annual event which brings together researchers, statistical analysts as well as computer and information professionals interested in all aspects of research data, from discovery to reuse. This 37th meeting spanned five days where participants could attend workshops, IASSIST business meetings and a myriad of presentations. This year, the event focused on the sharing of tools and techniques which ‘improves capabilities across disciplines and along the entire data life cycle’. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/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/scaife/ Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/scaife/ When I started as Technical Services Librarian at the Institute of Education (IOE) in September 2009, one of the first tasks I was given was to do something about all the broken links in the catalogue. Link rot [1] is the bane of the Systems Librarian’s life and I was well aware that you had to run fast to stand still. It is characterised by the decay of a static URL which has, for example, been placed in a library catalogue to reference a relevant Web site resource which has subsequently been moved to a different server or else removed altogether. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/blackwell-hackneyblackwell/ Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/blackwell-hackneyblackwell/ Quotation is the heart of scholarly argument and teaching, the activity of bringing insight to something complex by focused discussion of its parts. Philosophers who have reflected on the question of quotation have identified two necessary components: a name, pointer, or citation on the one hand and a reproduction or repetition on the other. Robert Sokolowski calls quotation a 'curious conjunction of being able to name and to contain' [1]; V. 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/ananiadou-et-al/ Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/ananiadou-et-al/ A core component of the European Union is a common market with a single information space that works with around two dozen national languages and many regional languages. This wide variety of languages presents linguistic barriers that can severely limit the free flow of goods, information and services throughout Europe. In this article, we provide an overview of the META-NET Network of Excellence [1]. This is an ambitious initiative, consisting of 44 centres from 31 countries in Europe, aiming to improve significantly on the number of language technologies that can assist European citizens, by supporting enhanced communication and co-operation across languages. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/hitchcock-tarrant/ Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/hitchcock-tarrant/ Preservation: The Effect of Going Digital Preservation of scholarly content seemed more straightforward when it was only available in printed form. Production, dissemination and archiving of print are performed by distinctly separate, specialist organisations, from publishers to national libraries and archives. Preservation of publications established as having cultural significance - printed literature, books and, in the academic world, journals fall into this category - is self-selecting and systematic in a way that has not yet been fully established for digital content. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/idcc-2010-rpt/ Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/66/idcc-2010-rpt/ The International Digital Curation Conference has been held annually by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [1] since 2005, quickly establishing a reputation for high-quality presentations and papers. So much so that, as co-chair Allen Renear explained in his opening remarks, after attending the 2006 Conference in Glasgow [2] delegates from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) offered to bring the event to Chicago. Thus it was that the sixth conference in the series [3], entitled ‘Participation and Practice: Growing the Curation Community through the Data Decade’, came to be held jointly by the DCC, UIUC and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/cig-2010-rpt/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/cig-2010-rpt/ The focus of this conference was initiatives to get through the current economic climate. Cataloguing departments are under threat of cutbacks as never before. Papers on streamlining, collaborative enterprises, shared catalogues and services, recycling and repurposing of content using metadata extraction techniques combined to give a flavour of the new thrift driving management. The continuing progress of the long awaited Resource Description and Access (RDA)[1][2] towards becoming the new international cataloguing standard was another hot topic. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/wilson-et-al/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/wilson-et-al/ The University of Oxford began to consider research data management infrastructure in earnest in 2008, with the ‘Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data’ Project [1]. Two further JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee)-funded pilot projects followed this initial study, and the approaches taken by these projects, and their findings, form the bulk of this article. Oxford’s decision to do something about its data management infrastructure was timely. A subject that had previously attracted relatively little interest amongst senior decision makers within the UK university sector, let alone amongst the public at large, was about to acquire a new-found prominence. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/briston-estlund/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/briston-estlund/ Permanent records of the University of Oregon (UO) are archived by the Special Collections and University Archives located within the University Libraries. In the digital environment, a new model is being created to ingest, curate and preserve electronic records. This article discusses two case studies working with the Office of the President to preserve electronic records. The first scenario describes working with the outgoing president, receiving records in a manner very similar to print records, where the Archives acted as a recipient once the records were ready to be transferred. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/taylor-teague/ Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/taylor-teague/ The Royal National Institute of Blind People National Library Service (RNIB NLS) was formed in 2007 as a result of a merger between the National Library for the Blind (NLB) and the Royal National Institute of Blind People’s Library and Information Service. It is the largest specialist library for readers with sight loss in the UK. RNIB holds the largest collection of books in accessible formats in the UK and provides a postal service to over 44,000 readers. 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/salo/ Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/salo/ Eager to prove their relevance among scholars leaving print behind, libraries have participated vocally in the last half-decade's conversation about digital research data. On the surface, libraries would seem to have much human and technological infrastructure ready-constructed to repurpose for data: digital library platforms and institutional repositories may appear fit for purpose. However, unless libraries understand the salient characteristics of research data, and how they do and do not fit with library processes and infrastructure, they run the risk of embarrassing missteps as they come to grips with the data challenge. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/63/thompson/ Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/63/thompson/ This article sets out the Wellcome Library's decision not explicitly to specify preferred file formats for long-term preservation. It discusses a pragmatic approach in which technical appraisal of the material is used to assess the Library's likelihood of preserving one format over another. The Library takes as its starting point work done by the Florida Digital Archive in setting a level of 'confidence' in its preferred formats. The Library's approach provides for nine principles to consider as part of appraisal. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/63/stevenson-ruddock/ Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/63/stevenson-ruddock/ The Archives Hub [1] is a JISC-funded service based at Mimas, a National Data Centre supporting world-class learning and research [2]. It brings together descriptions of archives for research and education, enabling users to search across over nearly 200 repositories. It stores descriptions in Encoded Archival Description (EAD). Interoperability is about working together (inter-operating). Whilst the central theme of this article is data interoperability – the ability to exchange or share information and use that information – this also requires individuals and organisations to work together; another form of interoperability. 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/63/planets-2010-rome-rpt/ Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/63/planets-2010-rome-rpt/ In far more dramatic circumstances than expected, the Planets Project [1] held its 3-day training event Digital Preservation – The Planets Way in Rome over 19 - 21 April 2010. This article reports its proceedings. The venue chosen for this Planets training event, the last of a series of five held over the past 12 months around Europe, was the prestigious Pontifica Universitata Gregoriana – the first Jesuit University, founded over 450 years ago in the heart of Rome and only a few minutes’ walk from the Trevi Fountain. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/nicholas-et-al/ Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/nicholas-et-al/ Discussion of digital identifiers, and persistent identifiers in particular, has often been confused by differences in underlying assumptions and approaches. To bring more clarity to such discussions, the PILIN Project has devised an abstract model of identifiers and identifier services, which is presented here in summary. Given such an abstract model, it is possible to compare different identifier schemes, despite variations in terminology; and policies and strategies can be formulated for persistence without committing to particular systems. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/fedora-eu-rpt/ Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/fedora-eu-rpt/ The Fedora digital repository system 1 is an open source solution for the management of all types of digital content. Its development is managed through DuraSpace [2], the same organisation that now oversees DSpace, and carried out by developers around the world. The developers, alongside the extensive body of Fedora users, form the community that sustains Fedora. Although there have been regular international user group meetings for the Fedora community, hosted in recent years as part of the Open Repositories conference, there have also been a number of more regional initiatives to foster interaction amongst Fedora users and provide assistance to those adopting the software. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/grigson-et-al/ Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/grigson-et-al/ Rarely is software a purely technical issue, though it may be marketed as ‘technology’. Software is embedded in work, and work patterns become moulded around it. Thus the use of a particular package can give rise to an inertia from which it can be hard to break free. Moreover, when this natural inertia is combined with data formats that are opaque or unique to a particular system, the organisation can become locked in to that system, a potential victim of the pricing policies or sluggish adaptability of the software provider. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/chaudhri-et-al/ Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/chaudhri-et-al/ The development of the Dublin Core Application Profiles (DCAPs) has been closely focussed on the construction of metadata standards targeted at specific resource types, on the implicit assumption that such a metadata solution would be immediately and usefully implementable in software environments that deal with such resources. The success of an application profile would thus be an inevitable consequence of correctly describing the generalised characteristics of those resources. Yet despite the earlier success of application profiles, more recent growth in usage of the DCAPs funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has been slow by comparison [1]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/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/editorial/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/editorial/ Perhaps one of the current benchmarks for gauging when a Web technology has migrated from the cluttered desks of the technorati to the dining tables of the chatterati is if it becomes a topic for BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze [1]. More accustomed to discussing matters such as child-rearing or a controversial pronouncement of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the panel members who, over the years have ranged from the liberal to the harrumphing illiberal (and in one case, both at the same time), recently did battle over Twitter [2]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/hogenaar/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/hogenaar/ The Internet has caused a revolution in the way scientists and scholars have access to scholarly output. Only 15 years ago, the (university) library decided what sources should be offered to the staff and individual scientists could only hope the librarian would listen to their wishes. In this system scientists frequently had no instantaneous access to the information they wanted. In such instances they had to rely on the Interlibrary Loan System. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/callaghan-et-al/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/callaghan-et-al/ The previous article about the Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS) Project [1] dealt with an introduction to the concept of overlay journals and their potential impact on the meteorological sciences. It also discussed the business cases and requirements that must be met for overlay journals to become operational as data publications. There is significant interest in data journals at this time as they could provide a framework to allow the peer-review and citation of datasets, thereby encouraging data scientists to ensure their data and metadata are complete and valid, and granting them academic credit for this work. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/stracchino-feng/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/stracchino-feng/ An overview of the first phase of developing a digital repository for multimedia resources at York University has recently been outlined by Elizabeth Harbord and Julie Allinson in Ariadne [1]. This article aims to provide a technical companion piece reflecting on a year’s progress in the technical development of the repository infrastructure. As Allinson and Harbord’s earlier article explained, it was decided to build the architecture using Fedora Commons [2] as the underlying repository, with the user interface being provided by Muradora [3]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/newsline/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/newsline/ 5th International Digital Curation Conference – Moving to Multi-Scale Science: Managing Complexity and DiversityMillennium Gloucester Hotel, Kensington, London 2-4 December 2009 http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2009/ The International Digital Curation Conference is an established annual event reaching out to individuals, organisations and institutions across all disciplines and domains involved in curating data for e-science and e-research. The Digital Curation Centre, which is responsible for organising the Conference, will be hosting a full day of workshops on 2 December including Disciplinary Dimensions of Digital Curation: New Perspectives on Research Data; Digital Curation 101 Lite Training; Citability of Research Data; and Repository Preservation Infrastructure (REPRISE). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/60/isko-2009-rpt/ Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/60/isko-2009-rpt/ I recently attended the first biennial Conference of the British Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO UK) [1] entitled ‘Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources’. It was organized in co-operation with the Department of Information Studies, University College London. If the intention was to focus on the diversity of resources out there, I also felt that the audience was very diverse in terms of levels of expertise and perspectives. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/60/newsline/ Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/60/newsline/ JISC Digital Media Course: Introduction to Image MetadataILRT, 8-10 Berkeley Square, Bristol, BS8 1HH Wednesday 9 December 2009 Full-day course: 10.00 - 16.30 http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/training/courses/introduction-to-image-metadata/ AimThis course is designed specifically to help you consider how to effectively incorporate metadata into the fabric of your image collection, through explanation, discussion and practical activities. AudienceAnyone new to describing and cataloguing images. Some previous knowledge of metadata will be useful but not essential. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/60/or-09-rpt/ Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/60/or-09-rpt/ I recently attended the annual Open Repositories 2009 Conference [1] in Atlanta, Georgia which hosted 326 delegates from 23 countries. For myself, as the SWORD [2] Project Manager, the event proved to be very worthwhile. My colleague Julie Allinson and I were both able to give a plenary presentation on the first day and a half-day workshop on the final day. Much of the conference addressed developments surrounding the Fedora, DSpace and EPrints systems that have occurred over the last year. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/impact-2009-rpt/ Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/impact-2009-rpt/ The first conference of the IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) Project was held at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands (KB) in The Hague on 6 and 7 April 2009. A total of 136 participants from over 30 countries attended. The main focus of the event was on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies and their use in supporting the large-scale digitisation of historical text resources. It was also an opportunity to introduce the IMPACT Project to a wider audience and to describe some of its initial results. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/newsline/ Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/newsline/ Digital Preservation – The Planets WayRoyal Library Copenhagen, Denmark 22-24 June 2009 http://www.planets-project.eu/events/copenhagen-2009/ Does your organisation know what to preserve digitally for the future? Do you want to discuss your strategies for digital preservation with colleagues and experts? Do you know how to preserve your collections for the future? Do you know which tools and services to use for this? There has been an explosion in the volume of information world-wide which will grow to 180 exabytes by 2011. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/tonkin-strelnikov/ Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/tonkin-strelnikov/ The IEMSR, a metadata schema registry, exists to support the development and use of metadata standards; in practice, what does this entail? Metadata is not a recent invention. It dates from at least the time of the Library of Alexandria, at which hundreds of thousands of scrolls were described using a series of indexes retaining various characteristics such as line count, subject classification, author name and biography. However, specific metadata standards, schemas and vocabularies are created on a regular basis, falling into and out of favour as time passes and needs change. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/58/chaudhri/ Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/58/chaudhri/ Efforts to create standard metadata records for resources in digital repositories have hitherto relied for the most part on the simple standard schema published by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) [1], the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, more commonly known as 'simple Dublin Core' [2]. While this schema, by and large, met the aim of making metadata interoperable between repositories for purposes such as OAI-PMH [3], the explicit means by which it achieved this, a drastic simplification of the metadata associated with digital objects to only 15 elements, had the side effect of making it difficult or impossible to describe specific types of resources in detail [4]. 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/voss/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/voss/ In recent years the principle of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) has grown increasingly important in digital library systems. More and more core functionalities are becoming available in the form of Web-based, standardised services which can be combined dynamically to operate across a broader environment [1]. Standard APIs for searching (SRU [2] [3], OpenSearch [4]), harvesting and syndication (OAI-OMH [5], ATOM [6]), copying (unAPI [7] [8]), publishing, editing (AtomPub [9], Jangle [10], SRU Update [11]), and more basic library operations, either already exist or are being developed. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/newsline/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/newsline/ TASI Courses for Remainder of 2008TASI (the JISC Advisory Service for still images, moving images and sound) has a few places left on its autumn/winter training programme. http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html 14 November 2008 Optimising your Images using Adobe Photoshop21 November 2008 Introduction to Image Metadata27 November 2008 Essential Techniques in Digital Image Capture28 November 2008 Advanced Techniques in Digital Image Capture03 December 2008 Digital Photography - Taking Control of your SLR11 December 2008 Scanning with the CLA Licence12 December 2008 Copyright and Digital ImagesThe following newly released course has just been added to the programme: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/rumsey-osteen/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/rumsey-osteen/ The new framework for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources, OAI-ORE, had its European release in April 2008 [1]. Amongst its practical uses, OAI-ORE has a role to play in digital preservation and continued access to files. This article describes the basic outline of the framework and how it can support the PRESERV2 project digital preservation model of provision of preservation services and interoperability for digital repositories. The PRESERV approach recognises that effective preservation is founded on three fundamental actions on data: copy, move and monitor. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/ipres-2008-rpt/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/ipres-2008-rpt/ iPRES 2008, the Fifth International Conference on Digital Preservation, was held at the British Library on 29-30 September, 2008. From its beginnings five years ago, iPRES has retained its strong international flavour. This year, it brought together over 250 participants from 33 countries. iPRES has become a major international forum for the exchange of ideas and practice in Digital Preservation. The theme of the conference was ‘Joined Up and Working: tools and methods for digital preservation’. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/cliff-rvw/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/cliff-rvw/ I'll be honest - I am no expert in data visualisation. I had not heard of Edward Tufte [1] before looking at this book and while I thought I had an idea about the topic, the book suggested to me I did not. Perhaps this makes me unable to judge the value of its content; but I prefer to think this means I can come at the work as a member of the target audience: 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/cooper/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/cooper/ When we purchased two collections of journal back files for hosting locally we knew that there would be some work involved in providing them to our patrons as a usable service. The key task we faced was to get our final solution neatly integrated into our existing electronic environment. We did not want our patrons to have to go to a stand-alone search page when they could use our federated search engine. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/or-08-rpt/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/or-08-rpt/ This was the third international Open Repositories Conference, the previous two being held in 2007, San Antonio, Texas [1] and in 2006, Sydney [2], so Europe was the third continent to host the event. Southampton was gloriously sunny for the five days of the conference (1-4 April), so there was no need to use the disposable plastic macs that were provided in the delegate bags. The event tends to attract people who have either already set up digital repositories in their institutions, are thinking about it or are interested in various aspects of repositories. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/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/55/henty/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/henty/ The growing capacity of ICT to contribute to research of all kinds has excited researchers the world over as they invent new ways of conducting research and enjoy the benefits of bigger and more sophisticated computers and communications systems to support measurement, analysis, collaboration and publishing. The expanding rate of ICT development is matched by the numbers of people wanting to join in this funfest, by growth in the amount of data being generated, and by demands for new and improved hardware, software, networks, and data storage. 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/kim-conf-2008-rpt/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/kim-conf-2008-rpt/ The KIM Project [1] is a £5.5 million research programme involving eleven UK universities and funded primarily by the EPSRC [2] and ESRC [3]. The Project’s tagline is ‘Knowledge and Information Management Through Life’, and it is primarily focussed on long-lived engineering artifacts and the companies that produce and support them. The driver for the research is a ‘product-service paradigm’ that is emerging in several industrial sectors, whereby a supplier is contracted not only to deliver a product such as an aircraft or building, but to maintain and adapt it throughout its lifecycle. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/currier/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/currier/ In 2002 the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published the IEEE Learning Object Metadata standard (IEEE LOM) [1], superseding the IMS Learning Resource Meta-data specification [2], which had been developed and used through several versions since the mid-1990s. Over the same general period, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) had established the Dublin Core (DC) as a standard for describing all kinds of web-based resources [3]. The Dublin Core Education Working Group [4] emerged as one of several special interest groups [5] developing specific metadata elements [6] for the use of their communities. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/eadie/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/eadie/ Following on from the project to develop an application profile for scholarly works (SWAP)[1], the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has recently funded through its Repositories and Preservation Programme, a series of projects to establish Application Profiles in the areas of images, time-based media, geospatial data and learning objects [2]. The work on the Images Application Profile (IAP) has been carried out for the six-month period from September 2007 to March 2008, and while the substantive project work is now complete and a draft Images Application Profile is in circulation, the ongoing job of promoting the profile to, and consulting with, the image, repository and metadata communities continues. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/mcn-rpt/ Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/mcn-rpt/ The Museum Computer Network (MCN) celebrated its 40th anniversary during its annual meeting, this year held at the Holiday Inn Chicago Mart Plaza. In 1967, museum professionals in New York City gathered to discuss the utility of computers in museum settings. This initial meeting provided the seed for what would become the Museum Computer Network [1]. 40 years later, 310 delegates from 14 countries and 32 states in the US gathered to take stock of successes and issues in the networked museum. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/allinson-et-al/ Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/allinson-et-al/ This article offers a twofold introduction to the JISC-funded SWORD [1] Project which ran for eight months in mid-2007. Firstly it presents an overview of the methods and madness that led us to where we currently are, including a timeline of how this work moved through an informal working group to a lightweight, distributed project. Secondly, it offers an explanation of the outputs produced for the SWORD Project and their potential benefits for the repositories community. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/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/dc-2007-rpt/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/dc-2007-rpt/ The main theme of this year's international conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications was 'Application Profiles: Theory and Practice' [1]. The conference was hosted by the Singapore National Library Board and held in the Intercontinental Hotel, which was across the road from the superb National Library building. The main conference took place on the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The keynote talks and the presentations of full papers took place in plenary sessions. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/kidmm-rpt/discussions.html Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/kidmm-rpt/discussions.html Information Retrieval Today: An Overview of Issues and MethodsDiscussionDavid Pullinger (UK Cabinet Office), in charge of the pan-government search solution, commented that ordinary people searching for government documents use terms other than the government's argot. Ironically, Google finds these documents effectively, because it picks up words that are associated with links, often written in plainer English. Conrad drew attention to a 2003 paper on e-democracy by Danny Budzak [5], comparing terms used to describe services on local government Web sites to those chosen by users. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/ecdl-2007-rpt/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/ecdl-2007-rpt/ This was the first time this event was held in the majestic and architecturally impressive city of Budapest. It was organised by The Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) [1] and held at the Europa Congress Centre. The event brought together a very mixed group of people from computer scientists, researchers, librarians, professors and managers. There were over 200 participants, from 36 countries. There were a total of 119 full paper submissions of which 36 were accepted after peer review, giving an acceptance rate of 30%. 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/53/kidmm-rpt/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/kidmm-rpt/ About KIDMMThe British Computer Society [1], which in 2007 celebrates 50 years of existence, has a self-image around engineering, software, and systems design and implementation. However, within the BCS there are over fifty Specialist Groups (SGs); among these, some have a major focus on ‘informatics’, or the content of information systems. At a BCS SG Assembly in 2005, a workshop discussed shared-interest topics around which SGs could collaborate. Knowledge, information and data management was identified as a candidate. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/ooman-tzouvaras/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/ooman-tzouvaras/ Europe's audiovisual heritage contains both a record and a representation of the past and as such it demonstrates the development of the 'audiovisual culture' we inhabit today. In this article we hope to offer an insight into the development of the Video Active Portal [1] which provides access broadcast heritage material retained by archives across Europe. We will explain how Video Active needed to find solutions for managing intellectual property rights, semantic and linguistic interoperability and the design of a meaningful user experience. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/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/groenewegen-treloar/ Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/52/groenewegen-treloar/ This paper describes the work of the ARROW Project to meet the requirements of the forthcoming Research Quality Framework (RQF). The RQF is an Australian Federal Government initiative designed to measure the quality and impact of Australian research, and is based partly on the existing Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) held in the UK. The RQF differs from the RAE in its reliance on local institutional repositories for the provision of access to research outputs, and this paper will explain how it is envisaged that this role will be filled, and the challenges that arise from this role. 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/russell/ Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/52/russell/ EThOSnet is a project funded by JISC, CURL and the project partners, to bring the UK to the forefront of international e-theses provision. It is a highly practical and participative project to turn the prototype e-theses infrastructure that was developed by EThOS, into a live service that will revolutionise the document supply arrangements for theses and greatly increase the visibility of UK research. The Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) Project arose after several earlier initiatives in the UK had articulated an urgent need to improve on the present methods for giving researchers access to PhD and other higher-level theses. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/52/iwmw-2007-rpt/ Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/52/iwmw-2007-rpt/ Torrential rain, thunder and lightening provided the backdrop to the Institutional Web Management Workshop [1], held this year at the University of York. Dramatic as they were, the conditions did not in any way dampen the enthusiasm of the delegates over the three days. The programme this year consisted of plenary sessions, discussion groups, parallel sessions and the famed social events. New this year was the IWMW Innovation Competition, where participants were invited to submit lightweight examples of innovative uses of Web technologies as well as the IWMW logo. 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/thompson/ Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/thompson/ Background: The W3C and Its Process The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was set up by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994 to preserve and enhance the public utility of the Web for everyone, to “lead the Web to its full potential”. It is a consortium of industrial and institutional members (around 450 at the time of writing) who pay on a sliding scale proportional to size. It produces Recommendations which are widely recognised as de facto standards. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/allinson-et-al/ Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/allinson-et-al/ In May 2006, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [1] approached UKOLN [2] and the Eduserv Foundation [3] to collaborate on the development of a metadata specification for describing eprints (alternatively referred to as scholarly works, research papers or scholarly research texts) [4]. A Dublin Core (DC) [5] application profile was chosen as the basis of the specification given the widespread use of DC in existing repositories, the flexibility and extensibility of the DCMI Abstract Model [6] and its compatibility with the Semantic Web [7]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/green-et-al/ Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/green-et-al/ With an increasing number of publications being made available digitally, and new supply chains and business models emerging for trading them, an urgent need has been identified for a standard way of expressing and communicating usage terms, and linking those terms to the publications. Reflecting the development pattern of the markets, this need was first identified in the scholarly journals sector. More recently, a similar requirement has been articulated for the communication of usage terms between publishers' digital repositories and search engines such as Google. 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/dc-2006-rpt/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/dc-2006-rpt/ DC-2006 [1], the annual conference of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), took place this year in the city of Manzanillo, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, with a subtitle of ‘Metadata for Knowledge and Learning’. The four-day conference was organised by the University of Colima [2], and the venue for the event was the Karmina Palace Hotel, a large hotel set within its own complex of restaurants, bars, shops and swimming pools. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/suzuki-sugita/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/suzuki-sugita/ Hokkaido University launched its project to construct an institutional repository in early 2004. After a year of discussion, planning and preparation, we started soliciting content in July 2005. Within a year of that start, we had assembled a depository of approximately 9,000 documents. It is named the Hokkaido University Collection of Scholarly and Academic Papers (HUSCAP)[1]. Eight thousand of these documents are digitised collections of faculty journal back issues that have been published over the many years of Hokkaido University's history. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/cig-2006-rpt/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/cig-2006-rpt/ Restful accommodation and pleasant food prepared the delegates for the carefully balanced mix of social networking sessions and challenging seminars. Everyone was extremely friendly and most proved to be erudite socialites, networking in some cases with great assertiveness and sense of purpose. Cataloguing and classification was revealed as an area of library and information science that has survived years of neglect by most library schools to reveal itself as the much-needed solution to online resource accessibility. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/chapman/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/chapman/ Cataloguing principles and rules ensure that bibliographic / catalogue records contain structured data about information resources and are created in a consistent manner within the various catalogue and metadata formats. Today ‘catalogues’ (in the widest sense) need to provide access to a wider range of information carriers, with a greater depth and complexity of content. While building on the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR), the work on Resource Description and Access (RDA) is going back to basic principles and aiming to develop a resource that can be used internationally by a wide range of personnel working in different areas. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/ferreira-et-al/ Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/ferreira-et-al/ Efforts to archive a large amount of digital material are being developed by many cultural heritage institutions. We have evidence of this in the numerous initiatives aiming to harvest the Web [1-5] together with the impressive burgeoning of institutional repositories [6]. However, getting the material inside the archive is just the beginning for any initiative concerned with the long-term preservation of digital materials. Digital preservation can best be described as the activity or set of activities that enable digital information to be intelligible for long periods of time. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/curating-email-rpt/ Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/curating-email-rpt/ This workshop organised by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [1] brought together librarians, archivists and IT specialists from academic, commercial and government sectors. Email is a major universal communication tool. It’s used for both assigning responsibilities and for decision making. People using email have differing perspectives and expectations from those who manage the infrastructure. While there are common desires for preservation no one solution fits all circumstances. Day One: Emails as Records Seamus Ross, DCC, chaired the first session. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/fedora-users-rpt/ Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/fedora-users-rpt/ The Fedora Users Conference 2006, for users of the open source Fedora repository system [1] was the second to be run under the auspices of the core Fedora development team, following an initial conference at Rutgers University in June 2005. It is, though, one among a collection of conferences and meetings that have taken place over the past year based on using Fedora, with venues as diverse as Copenhagen, Aberystwyth, Sydney, and Hull. 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/newsline/ Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/newsline/ UKeiG Training: Developing and managing e-book collectionsThe UK eInformation Group (UKeiG), in co-operation with Academic and National Library Training Co-operative (ANLTC), are pleased to present a course entitled 'Developing and managing e-book collections', to be held in Training Room 1, The Library, Dublin City University, Dublin 9 on Tuesday, 12 September 2006 from 9.30a.m. to 4.30p.m. Course OutlineThis course opens the door to a new electronic format. In the last six years, there has been an unprecedented growth in the publishing of e-books with an increasing array of different types available for all sectors. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/dunning/ Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/dunning/ An article by Dan Greenstein and Jennifer Trant in an early edition (July 1996) of Ariadne introduced readers to the aims and organisation of the fledging Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) [1]. Exactly ten years on from that, as the AHDS undergoes a systematic review by its funders, it seems appropriate to take stock of how the AHDS has evolved, comparing its current position with that envisaged for it when the organisation commenced work in the 1990s. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/reese/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/reese/ Surveying the current metasearch tools landscape, it is somewhat surprising to find so few non-commercial implementations available. This is especially true considering that, as a group, the library community has cultivated a very vibrant open source community over the past ten or so years. One wonders then, why this particular service has been ceded to the world of commercial vendors. One can speculate that the creation and management of a metasearch knowledge base has likely played a large role [1]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/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/krowne/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/krowne/ In this article we present a framework, QMSearch, which improves searching in the context of scholarly digital libraries by taking a 'quality metrics-aware' approach. This means the digital library deployer or end-user can customise how results are presented, including aspects of both ranking and organisation in general, based upon standard metadata attributes and quality indicators derived from the general library information environment. To achieve this, QMSearch is generalised across metadata fields, quality indicators, and user communities, by abstracting all of these notions and rendering them into one or more 'organisation specifications' which are used by the system to determine how to organise results. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/vanveen/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/vanveen/ "I want my browser to recognise information in Web pages and offer me functionality to remix it with relevant information from other services. I want to control which services are offered to me and how they are offered." In this article I discuss the ingredients that enable users to benefit from a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) by combining services according to their preferences. This concept can be summarised as a user-accessible machine-readable knowledge base of service descriptions in combination with a user agent. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/robertson/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/robertson/ With the wider deployment of repositories, the Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is becoming a common method of supporting interoperability between repositories and services. It provides 'an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting' [1]. Nodes in a network using this protocol are 'data providers' or 'service providers'. Although repository software supporting OAI-PMH is not overly complex [2], without programming skills or access to technical support, implementing and supporting a repository is not an entirely straightforward task. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/jisc-conf-rpt/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/jisc-conf-rpt/ On 14 March 2006 we found ourselves back at the Birmingham International Convention Centre (ICC) for the 2006 JISC Conference. The annual conference [1] is both an opportunity for JISC to platform the variety of activities it funds and for delegates to learn about the full range of JISC's work by participating in seminars, debates, workshops and demonstrations. This report tries to capture the air of the event through a series of session snapshots. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/jisc-repositories-rpt/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/jisc-repositories-rpt/ The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) Digital Repositories Programme [1] held its second Programme meeting towards the end of March. Following in the collaborative tradition set by last October's joint Programme meeting with the Digital Preservation and Asset Management Programme [2], this gathering was themed around the cluster groups established by the Digital Repositories Programme [3] and included many guests from other JISC areas of work and beyond. These clusters seek to encompass many of the diverse issues being considered across the Digital Repositories Programme, including the different repository types (e-Learning and Scientific data), the infrastructural and technical issues (Integrating infrastructure and Machine services) and the social, cultural and legal topics (Legal and policy, Personal resource management strategies and Preservation). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/lauke/ Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/lauke/ When it comes to assessing a Web site's accessibility, any Web designer should know by now that simply running the mark-up though an automated testing tool is not enough. Automated tools are limited, purely testing for syntax, easily ascertained "yes or no" situations and a set of (sometimes quite arbitrary) heuristics, which are often based on an interpretation of accessibility guidelines on the part of the tool's developers. Nonetheless, automated checkers are a useful tool in the arsenal of accessibility-conscious designers, provided that their results are checked for false positives/negatives [1] and backed up by the necessary manual checks, carried out by a knowledgeable human tester who is familiar with any potential access issues and how they manifest themselves in a Web site. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/royan-rvw/ Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/royan-rvw/ There is no shortage of guides to the delivery of e-services in learning centres, although often their emphasis is on academic rather than local authority institutions [1]. In the public library field, it could be argued that more than enough journal articles and monographs on the topic have already been churned out in the 8 years since the publication of New Library: the People's Network [2]. Is there really room on the shelves for one more? http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/e-theses-rpt/ Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/e-theses-rpt/ Doctoral theses contain some of the most current and valuable research produced within universities, but are underused as research resources. Where electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are open access, they are used many times more often than paper theses that are available only via inter-library loan. Many universities and other organisations across Europe are now working hard to make ETDs more openly available and useful. In an attempt to co-ordinate this activity, an invitation-only workshop was held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in January, to see what could be learned from existing examples of best practice and to see how the participants might work together in the future. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/day-rvw/ Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/day-rvw/ The Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) is an important annual publication containing review articles on many topics of relevance to library and information science, published on behalf of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). Since volume 36, the editor of ARIST has been Professor Blaise Cronin of Indiana University, Bloomington. The twelve chapters in volume 38 are divided into three sections, dealing with theory, technology, and policy. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/higgins-rvw/ Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/higgins-rvw/ The title of this book will be bewitching for any library struggling with integrating the myriad of digital resources, to which they provide access, into its organisational and cataloguing workflows. However, the manual has a very narrow focus and gives an unscalable solution, which fails to address the problems faced by hybrid libraries, with a wide range of complex digital resources requiring lifecycle control. ContentAs a simple manual the book will be very helpful for libraries which are starting to provide access to licensed online resources for the first time. 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/newsline/ Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/newsline/ PV 2005: Ensuring long-term preservation and adding value to scientific and technical data Royal Society of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK 21-23 November 2005 This conference is the third of a series on long-term preservation and adding value to scientific data. Topics covered include: 1. Ensuring long-term data preservationState of the art of data archiving and access techniques, for example: What standardisation has to offer (in the form of feedback from experience)Adapting archiving techniques to the different categories of information handled, such as scientific data, technical data, documents, sounds and imagesSystem architecture in the context of constant technological developments2. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/awre/ Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/awre/ Under the aegis of the UK Joint Information Systems Committee's (JISC) Portals Programme [1] development projects have taken place to investigate the use of portals as the presentation path for a variety of search tools. A major output from these projects has been the development of a portal interface, a Web site that users could come to in order to make use of the functionality that the portal provided, particularly searching. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/white-rvw/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/white-rvw/ As the author of three books, and about to start work on a fourth, I do begin to doubt my own sanity. Last year I wrote The Content Management Handbook in the course of around four months, and even then by the time it was published with great speed by Facet Publishing, several of the comments in the book had been overtaken by events. This is a constant concern for any author, but especially those working on high technology topics. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/dcc-pi-rpt/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/dcc-pi-rpt/ A Digital Curation Centre (DCC) Meeting on Persistent Identifiers was held over 30 June - 1 July 2005 at the Wolfson Building at the University of Glasgow. This is a new construction (2002) just opposite the 1970s Boyd-Orr building, mentioned before in Ariadne's pages. The architecture of this building is quite unlike the Boyd-Orr building however, being light and airy, with more imaginative use of space: the lecture theatre in which the meeting took place is in the shape of an eye, situated at the edge of the main open space. 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/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/guy-rvw/ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/guy-rvw/ Anyone scaling the heights of metadata for the management and retrieval of digital information for the first time can be forgiven a degree of initial bewilderment. The same goes for this article, so a glossary of terms found here are offered in the spirit of saving readers' time [1]. David Haynes' book appears to go a long way to guiding its explorers through the foothills and beyond in this complete introduction to the subject for the information professional. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/prudlo/ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/prudlo/ In recent years initiatives to create software packages for electronic repository management have mushroomed all over the world. Some institutions engage in these activities in order to preserve content that might otherwise be lost, others in order to provide greater access to material that might otherwise be too obscure to be widely used such as grey literature. The open access movement has also been an important factor in this development. Digital initiatives such as pre-print, post-print, and document servers are being created to come up with new ways of publishing. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/eevl/ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/eevl/ Hot TopicsEEVL, the Internet guide to engineering, mathematics and computing, provides access to a wide range of information on the three subjects covered through its Internet Resource Catalogue and various additional services. Hot Topics [1], a new feature added recently, gives access to in-depth reports on topical engineering and technology issues. The Hot Topics are freely available, and are provided through CSA [2]. CSA is an information company that specialises in publishing and distributing, in print and electronically, 100 bibliographic and full-text databases and journals in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts & humanities, and technology. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/mcleish/ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/mcleish/ What and Why Is Shibboleth?One of the major issues that faces all today’s Internet users is identity management: how to prove to a Web site that you are who you claim you are, and do so securely enough to prevent someone else being able to convince the Web site that they are you. There are many initiatives attacking the problem, with approaches both technical and legal. Shibboleth [1] is a relatively new piece of software which concentrates on one specific area: trust management within the Higher Education community and between that community and the academic publishers which service it. 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/johnston/ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/johnston/ The JISC Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry (IEMSR) Project [1] is funded by JISC through its Shared Services Programme to develop a metadata schema registry as a pilot shared service for the JISC Information Environment (JISC IE). Partners in the project are UKOLN, University of Bath and the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol. The Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS) and the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) are contributing to the project in an advisory capacity. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/42/rahtz/ Sun, 30 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/42/rahtz/ Most Web sites of any size want to offer a facility to perform a free-text search of their content. While we all at least claim to believe in the possibilities of the semantic web, and take care over our navigation aids and sitemaps, we know that sooner or later our readers want to type 'hedgehog' into a search box. Yes, even http://www.microsoft.com [1] returns plenty of hits if you try this. 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/42/lauke/ Sun, 30 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/42/lauke/ Mozilla Firefox [1] is a free, open-source Web browser based on the Mozilla codebase. Version 1.0 was recently released after two years of development, so now may be a good time to evaluate this browser's capabilities. "Out of the box" Mozilla Firefox offers a variety of features catering to both occasional Web surfers and power users. The more advanced functionality can be particularly noted as a real time saver during the Web development process. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/white-rvw/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/white-rvw/ The problems of being an editor of a multi-author book probably do not escalate as the square of the number of contributors, but nevertheless it must be quite a significant function. You have the problems of selecting the authors in the first place, replacing those that drop out, coping with the 80% of contributors that miss the original deadline and then carrying out remedial work on authors that have failed to abide by the scope notes. 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/41/vanderkuil/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/vanderkuil/ The SURF Programme Digital Academic Repositories (DARE) is a joint initiative of Dutch universities to make their academic output digitally accessible. The KB (National Library of the Netherlands), the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) and the NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) also cooperate in this unique programme. DARE is being coordinated by the SURF Foundation [1]. The programme will run from January 2003 until December 2006. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/jones/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/jones/ The Theses Alive Plugin for Institutional Repositories (Tapir) [1] has been developed at Edinburgh University Library [2] to help provide an E-Thesis service within an institution using DSpace [3]. It has been developed as part of the Theses Alive! [4] Project under funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [5], as part of the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) [6] Programme. This article looks at DSpace, the repository system initially developed by Hewlett-Packard and MIT and subsequently made available as a community-owned package. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/godby/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/godby/ A Metadata Standard for Learning ObjectsAs learning objects grow in number and importance, institutions are faced with the daunting task of managing them. Like familiar items in library collections, learning objects need to be organised by subject and registered in searchable repositories. But they also introduce special problems. As computer files, they are dependent on a particular hardware and software environment. And as materials with a pedagogical intent, they are associated with metrics such as learning objectives, reading levels and methods for evaluating student performance. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/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/paschoud-rvw/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/paschoud-rvw/ This is not a book that is intended to be read cover-to-cover, and the editors make this clear in a handy reading guide. The authors collected here come from a range of backgrounds and organisations across the public and private sectors, but predominantly (like the two editors) from what I would call the information management consultancy industry. The preface by Peter Morville purports to be 'a brief history of information architecture', covering the period from 1994 (back before we were even talking about 'information landscapes' at the peak of the eLib Programme [1]) to 2002. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/erpanet-ids-rpt/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/erpanet-ids-rpt/ Day OneIntroductionWelcome and KeynoteOverview of Persistent Identifier initiativesURNOpenURL - The Rough GuideInfo URIsThe DCMI Persistent Identifier Working GroupThe CENDI ReportARKPURLsOverview of the Handle SystemDOIDay TwoIdentifiers at the Coal FaceEPICURThe National Digital Data Archive (NDA)NBN:URN Generator and ResolverDIVAThe Publisher’s PerspectiveDigital Object Identifiers for Publishing and the e-Learning CommunitiesPublication and Citation of Scientific and Primary DataInformation and the Government of CanadaConclusion This event, organised by ERPANET [1], brought together around 40 key players with an interest in the topic of persistent identifiers in order to synthesize the current state of play, debate the issues and consider what lies on the horizon in this field of activity. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/newsline/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/newsline/ Seminar Invitation from DEF - Danish Electronic Research LibraryThe DEF XML Web Services project invites you to participate in the seminar: Building Digital Libraries with XML Web Services on Friday 27 August 2004 from 9:30 to 16:00 at the Technical University of Denmark, Building 303, DK-2800 Lyngby. The headlines of the seminar are: § Setting the scene: XML - tools, visions, initiatives - Introduction to XML and Open Source Web Services http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/oss-watch-rpt/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/oss-watch-rpt/ OSS Watch's [1] second national conference focused on an often articulated anxiety concerning how an institution will answer the question of support when considering the deployment of open source software. OSS Watch is a pilot advisory service set up by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to provide UK Higher and Further Education with neutral and authoritative guidance about free and open source software. Whereas OSS Watch's inaugural conference in December 2003 [2] presented an overview of the entire field, this event concentrated on what is sometimes thought to be the single most significant barrier to institutional take-up of open source software. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/cilip-cig-rpt/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/cilip-cig-rpt/ The conference was aimed at information professionals interested in looking at issues that are changing cataloguing and indexing. The latest international developments in metadata standards, cataloguing codes, taxonomies and controlled languages unlock new opportunities for cataloguers' involvement. They also raise complex interoperability issues which go beyond traditional cataloguing and highlight the need for the acquisition of new skills in the digital information environment. The event focused on three interlinked themes: new and emerging standards, collection-level description and professional education. 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/ndad/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/ndad/ The National Archives has been building up a collection of UK Government datasets since 1997 under a contract with the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) [1]. The archived datasets are available to users free of charge through the World Wide Web and are known as the National Digital Archive of Datasets (NDAD) [2]. Datasets are one of the earliest types of digital record produced by Government departments, some of those now archived dating back to 1963. 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/erpanet-rpt/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/erpanet-rpt/ On 15-17 December 2003, the ERPANET Project [1] and the ICSU (International Council for Science) Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) [2] held a joint workshop on the selection, appraisal and retention of digital scientific data at the National Library of Portugal (Biblioteca Nacional) in Lisbon. The workshop brought together around 80 participants, a mix of scientists, archivists and data specialists. Day OneAfter the opening introductions, the first presentation was an overview of CODATA data archiving activities given by Bill Anderson, co-chair of the CODATA Task Group on Preservation and Archiving of Scientific and Technical Data in Developing Countries. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/pearce/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/pearce/ Personalisation has become an increasingly salient topic in the UK library and information management sector, yet to date much of the work undertaken has been in the academic and knowledge management sectors [1]. However, the South Yorkshire-based IT for Me Project [2] is looking to bring personalised access to online resources to public libraries. The project, which began in October 2003, will create a Web-based platform to provide access to personalised resources. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/powell/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/powell/ Over the last eighteen months or so, the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has been funding some collaborative work between the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) Hubs [1] and Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) Centres [2]. The primary intention of these subject-based RDN/LTSN partnerships was to: Develop collection policies that clarified the relationships between the two sets of activities.Enable the sharing of records within and beyond partnerships using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [3]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/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/39/web-focus/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/web-focus/ What Is FOAF?The term FOAF [1] stands for Friend of a Friend. As might be deduced from this phrase one of the key applications of FOAF is to provide a mechanism for creating links to one’s friends. From the links to one’s immediate circle of friends automated software can be used to process links from your friends, which can provide a visualisation of ‘friends of a friend’. FOAF is a Semantic Web application which can be used to provide personal information in a form suitable for automated processing. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/summers/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/summers/ Net::OAI::Harvester is a Perl package for easily interacting with OAI-PMH repositories as a metadata harvester. The article provides examples of how to use Net::OAI::Harvester to write short programs that execute each of the 6 OAI-PMH verbs. Issues related to efficient XML parsing of OAI-PMH responses are discussed, as are specific techniques used by Net::OAI::Harvester. The Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is an increasingly popular protocol for sharing metadata about digital objects. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/editorial/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/editorial/ At a time when long-running institutions such as Ariadne are understandably mindful of their independence [1], the decision not to persist in the editorial inclination to lead on articles slightly at a tangent to the main thrust of Ariadne’s work might be considered craven. However, under any other circumstances it might justifiably have been considered perverse and hence I begin by drawing your attention to the article by Marieke Guy, Andy Powell and Michael Day. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/ltg-tigers/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/ltg-tigers/ 'Herding Tigers' was held at Oxford University Computing Services on the 17 December 2003, with a theme of Best practice in e-Learning development. This was the second event of its type organised by the University's Learning Technologies Group [1], the previous year's having had a slightly different focus on raising awareness and collaborative working between e-Learning practitioners and academics. This year the day had been devised as an opportunity to discuss some of the practical challenges presented to developers when dealing with the areas of accessibility, applying learning technology standards, and evaluation. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/oss-watch-rpt/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/oss-watch-rpt/ OSS Watch [1] is a pilot advisory service set up by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to provide UK higher and further education with neutral and authoritative guidance about free and open source software and related standards. Although it is rather small, (a staffing of 1.25 full-time equivalent (FTE)), this new service has stakeholders ranging from IT directors and managers developing institutional IT strategies that acknowledge the role that open source software does (and will continue to) play; to IT staff deploying software across universities and colleges; and to software developers seeking advice on how to release their work as open source. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/woldering/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/woldering/ The European Library (TEL) Project [1] completed at the end of January 2004. The key aim of TEL was to investigate the feasibility of establishing a new Pan-European service which would ultimately give access to the combined resources of the national libraries of Europe [2]. The project was partly funded by the European Commission as an accompanying measure under the cultural heritage applications area of Key Action 3 of the Information Societies Technology (IST) research programme. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/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/portole/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/portole/ Abstract The PORTOLE (Providing Online Resources To Online Learning Environments) Project was a JISC-funded project which sought to produce a range of tools for tutors which could be used to enable them to discover information resources and to embed these into their course modules from within a University Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). The VLE in use at the Universities of Leeds and Oxford is the Bodington system. A key deliverable of the project was to produce tools that were designed with the ease of incorporation into other VLE environments in mind. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/nixon/ Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/nixon/ DAEDALUS [1] is a three-year JISC-funded project under the FAIR Programme [2] which will build a network of open access digital collections at the University of Glasgow. These collections will enable us to unlock access to a wide range of our institutional scholarly output. This output includes not only published and peer-reviewed papers but also administrative documents, research finding aids, pre-prints and theses. DAEDALUS is also a member of the CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries) SHERPA Project [3]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/duke/ Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/duke/ Subject Gateways act as a main point of access to high-quality resources on the Web. They are resource discovery guides that provide links to information resources which can be whole Web sites, organisational home pages and other collections or services, themed around a specific subject, such as the physical sciences or humanities. At their core is a catalogue of rich metadata records that describe Internet resources - subject specialists identify and select the resources and create the descriptions. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/ecdl2003-rpt/ Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/ecdl2003-rpt/ ECDL2003 was the seventh in the annual series of European Digital Library conferences, this year hosted in Trondheim, Norway. The unusual move from September to August does not carry through to next year’s conference at the University of Bath, UK, which returns to the ‘normal’ September slot (12-16 September). My interests in digital library applications, user perspectives and service management obviously influence my ‘take’ on the conference experience and the sessions I attend. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/ecdl-web-archiving-rpt/ Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/ecdl-web-archiving-rpt/ On 21 August 2003, the 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives [1] [2] was held in Trondheim, Norway in association with the 7th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) [3]. This event was the third in a series of annual workshops that have been held in association with the ECDL conferences held in Darmstadt [4] and Rome [5]. These earlier workshops primarily focused on the activities of legal deposit libraries and the collection strategies and technologies being used by Web archiving initiatives [6]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/biome/ Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/biome/ BIOME is currently participating in a major project to enhance interoperability between the BIOME core database and those being created by our cognate Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) Subject Centres. The partners in the project are the Resource Description Network (RDN) Hubs BIOME and ALTIS and five LTSN centres: Bioscience; Health Sciences and Practice; Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism; Medicine, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine; and Psychology. The overall aim of this project is to provide members of the health and life science communities in the UK with richer and easier access to learning and teaching resources and to act as a starting off point for future Hub/LTSN Subject Centre collaborations. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/oa-forum-ws-rpt/ Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/oa-forum-ws-rpt/ Welcome and IntroductionRachel Heery, UKOLN, University of BathDelegates were welcomed and reminded that this was the fourth and final in a series of workshops which have been organised by the Open Archives Forum Project. Rachel Heery explained that the project was a supporting action funded by the European Commission to bring together EU researchers and implementers working in the area of open access to archives. Fourth Open Archives Forum Technical Validation Report Birgit Matthaei, HU Berlin Technical validation based on Resource Database http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/anderson/ Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/anderson/ Many digital versions of texts–whether they be the plays of Aeschylus, or stories from this week’s Times–can now be accessed by a worldwide audience, thanks to the Internet and developments in international standards and the computer industry. But while modern newspapers in English and even the Greek plays of Aeschylus can be viewed on the Internet in their original script, reading articles that cite a line of original text in Egyptian hieroglyphs is more problematic, for this script has not yet been included in the international character encoding standard Unicode. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/martini/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/martini/ One of the aims of all JISC 7⁄99 projects has been to explore technologies that are generic in nature in support of improved learning and specifically, to “Identify the generic and transferable aspect of the development projects”. In pursuit of this aim, the MARTINI Project has been specifically standards-driven. One of the standards that we have employed is the IMS Enterprise Person Object Model for representation of student information. As has been discovered, however, there are two fundamental obstacles to overcome with the use of the IMS standard; one, the standard only covers a small subset of the information any institution holds about a student, and two, there is a diverse array of systems and architectures that hold this data within each institution. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/maccoll-rpt/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/maccoll-rpt/ This event was organised jointly by UKOLN and the National e-Science Centre (NESC) [1]. Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, gave the introduction, reminding us that this was the second UKOLN-NESC workshop. The first happened about a year ago, bringing together the digital library and Grid computing communities for the first time. The presentations were as follows: Building a Semantic Infrastructure - David De RoureWhy Ontologies? - Jeremy RogersPublishing and Sharing Schemas - Rachel Heery and Pete JohnstonImplementing Ontologies in (my)Grid Environments - Carole GobleKnowledge Organisation Systems - Doug TudhopeConcluding Remarks - Carole GobleBuilding a Semantic InfrastructureIn his introductory talk, Building a Semantic Infrastructure, Professor David De Roure of the University of Southampton, provided a history lesson at a gallop on the Grid and the Semantic Web. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/browning/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/browning/ The JISC-funded programme ‘Building Managed Learning Environments (MLEs) in HE’ [1] was of three years’ duration and concluded in July 2003. The aim of the programme was to explore developments that test, evaluate, and prove (or in some circumstances disprove) the generic deployment of technology in support of improved learning. The programme has developed good practice and shared ideas and experiences across FE and HE sectors. The specific objectives were to: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/romeo/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/romeo/ The Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) enables the ‘disclosure’ of metadata by Data Providers and the harvesting of that metadata by Service Providers. Although there is nothing to stop commercial providers from utilising this open-source protocol [1], it has its roots in the open access community and as such is used by many open archives. These include subject-based archives such as ArXiv [2], CogPrints [3], and the increasing number of Institutional Repositories, many of which have been established as a result of funding via the UK JISC FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Repositories) programme [4]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/web-focus/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/web-focus/ WWW 2003 was the 12th in the series of international World Wide Web conferences organised by the IW3C2 (the International World Wide Web Conference Committee). The international WWW conferences provide an opportunity for the Web research community to describe their research activities. Other tracks at the conference cover areas such as cultural resources, e-learning, accessibility, etc. In addition W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) gives a series of presentations which describe many of the new Web standards being developed. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/lyon/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/lyon/ This article presents some new digital library development activities which are predicated on the concept that research and learning processes are cyclical in nature, and that subsequent outputs which contribute to knowledge, are based on the continuous use and reuse of data and information [1]. We can start by examining the creation of original data, (which may be, for example, numerical data generated by an experiment or a survey, or alternatively images captured as part of a clinical study). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/waller/ Tue, 29 Apr 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/waller/ Long before the first Roman scrawled (possibly a term such as "detritus") in the margin of something he was reading, people had been making annotations against something they had read or seen, however uncomplimentary. It is more than likely that the first annotation occurred the moment the person making it was able to find a suitable implement with which to scrawl his or her opinion against the original. Annotating may be defined as making or furnishing critical or explanatory notes or comment. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/miller/ Tue, 29 Apr 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/miller/ There is, unsurprisingly, an increasing recognition that digital resources of all kinds are eminently suitable to repurposing and reuse. The Iconex Project [1], for example, was funded under JISC's 5/99 Programme to look at the creation, storage and dissemination of reusable learning objects. Service providers of the Arts & Humanities Data Service [2] concern themselves with collecting the digital outputs of scholarly activity in order to preserve them for posterity, but also with facilitating their ongoing use and reuse by learners, teachers and researchers across the community [3]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/web-focus/ Tue, 29 Apr 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/web-focus/ In Ariadne issue 33 the Web Focus column encouraged Web developers to "get serious about HTML standards" [1]. The article advocated use of XHTML and highlighted reasons why this was an important standard for Web developers. XHTML is just one of the standards which has been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). W3C has also developed several standards for XML as well as standards in the area of hyperlinking, multimedia and graphics. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/rydberg-cox/ Wed, 15 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/rydberg-cox/ The field of classics has a long tradition of electronic editions of both primary and secondary materials for the study of the ancient world. Large electronic corpora of Greek and Latin texts are available from groups such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the Packard Humanities Institute, and the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, and in the Perseus Digital Library [1]. Because such large collections of primary texts have already been digitized, it is now possible to devote concerted effort to developing new computational tools that can transform the way that humanists work with these digitized versions of their primary sources. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/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/powell/ Wed, 15 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/powell/ An introduction to the IMS Digital Repositories Working GroupIMS [1] is a global consortium that develops open specifications to support the delivery of e-learning through Learning Management Systems (LMS). (Note: in UK higher and further education we tend to use the term Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) in preference to LMS). IMS activities cover a broad range of areas including accessibility, competency definitions, content packaging, digital repositories, integration with ‘enterprise’ systems, learner information, metadata, question & test and simple sequencing. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/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/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/eevl/ Wed, 09 Oct 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/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/33/editorial/ Wed, 09 Oct 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/editorial/ Welcome to the September/October issue of Ariadne. The concept of the 'Information Environment' is now one which appears often in Digital Library literature. While it is not a vague concept, it is still one which is undergoing development. Implementing an Information Environment is therefore currently a problematic exercise. Those interested in undertaking such an implementation therefore will be interested in a number of articles featured in this issue of Ariadne. 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/33/edner/ Wed, 09 Oct 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/edner/ The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) Information Environment (IE, a development from the DNER - Distributed National Electronic Resource) is intended to help users in the UK academic sector maximise the value of published information resources by developing a coherent environment out of the confusing array of systems and services currently available. The EDNER Project (Formative Evaluation of the DNER,< http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/edner>) is funded to undertake ongoing evaluation of the developing IE over the full three years of the JISC 5/99 Learning & Teaching and Infrastructure Programme period i. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/web-focus/ Wed, 09 Oct 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/web-focus/ If you talk to long-established Web authors or those responsible for managing large Web sites or developing Web applications intended for widespread use in a heterogeneous environment you are likely to find that the need for compliance with Web standards is well-understood. There will be an understanding of the need to avoid a re-occurrence of the "browser wars" and to minimise the development time for an environment in which, especially in the higher education community, end users are likely to use a wide range of platforms (MS Windows, Apple Macintosh, Linux, etc. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/theses-dissertations/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/theses-dissertations/ ‘ETDs’ is the acronym widely used in the US to stand for ‘Electronic Theses and Dissertations’. The father of the ETD movement, Professor Ed Fox of Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech), explains the acronym as containing an implicit Boolean ‘OR’: ‘ETs’ OR ‘EDs’ equals ‘ETDs’. This makes for a very convenient shorthand, whereby a digital object which is either an electronic thesis or an electronic dissertation can be referred to as ‘an ETD’. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/metalib/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/metalib/ Since the advent of online databases there have been concerns about the different interfaces and software provided by publishers and suppliers. In recent years, the growth in the number of databases and full-text electronic journal services has made this aspect of electronic resource provision even more challenging, particularly for Higher Education institutions. Just as for the foreseeable future databases are likely to continue to be delivered through a variety of interfaces, it is equally likely that there will be increasing demands from users for simplified access. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/iconex/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/iconex/ The Iconex project [1] at the University of Hull was funded under the JISC's 5/99 Programme to demonstrate the value of small, portable, pieces of digital content in assisting student learning. The project is creating a repository of exemplar interactive Learning Objects, many of which are already available for use and reuse. This repository is intended to stimulate cross-fertilisation between disciplines to develop generic views of types of interaction, and to encourage the reuse of Learning Objects. 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/open-archives-forum/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/open-archives-forum/ Pisa is small medieval Italian town, and, as is well-known, it features some extraordinary architecture, both religious and secular, some of which dates back to the Roman period. The Square of Miracles is in a class by itself, but there are several notable buildings as you move towards the river Arno. Including the Scuola Normale Superiore, where Enrico Fermi studied, a medieval building refaced by the artist and art historian Vasari much later. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/eprint-archives/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/eprint-archives/ This article outlines the aims of the e-prints archive at the University of Glasgow and recounts our initial experiences in setting up an institutional e-prints archive using the eprints.org software. It follows on from the recent article by Stephen Pinfield, John MacColl and Mike Gardner in the last issue of Ariadne [1]. The Open Archives Initiative [2] and the arguments for e-prints services [3] need little introduction here and have been ably covered by previous articles in Ariadne and elsewhere. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/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/www2002/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/www2002/ WWW2002 [1] was the 11th annual World Wide Web Conference, held this year in Tourist Hell (Waikiki), Hawaii. WWW2002 ran over three days, with 10 refereed tracks including one on the Semantic Web, and six ‘alternate’ tracks. All the papers from the conference are available online in html [2]. You might also like to look at the RDF Interest group chatlogs and blog pages for the days covering the conference [3] and I also have some photos [4] as does Dave Beckett [5]. 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/open-archives-forum/ Wed, 10 Apr 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/open-archives-forum/ The Open Archives Forum: Mission and GoalsThe Open Archives Forum provides a European focus for the dissemination of information about European activities in Open Archives. A particular focus is on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The Open Archives Forum aims to promote the idea of globally distributed digital archives within Europe, to support the establishment of new digital archives and their related services, and to initiate European special interest groups. It is important to add particular European interests to already existing models such as the Open Archives Initiative. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/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/archives/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/archives/ The Access to Archives project is one of the most exciting initiatives in the world of archives in England. It aims at developing a virtual national archival catalogue for the country. At a click of the mouse one will be able to find multilevel descriptions of some of the most important historical records of England. For family historians, school teachers and pupils, academic researchers or just curious life long learners the A2A gateway is a unique facility to pursue their interests and research from a PC terminal any time of the day, anywhere in the world. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/invisible-web/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/invisible-web/ Chris Sherman and Gary PriceThe Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can’t seeCyber Age Books, 2001. ISBN 0-910965-51-XPrice: $29.95I first became interested in the Invisible Web after seeing Chris Sherman and Gary Price talking at the Internet Librarian International Conference in March this year. In their words “The Invisible Web consists of material that general purpose search engines cannot or will not include in their collection of Web pages.” If currently available resources from search engines are the tip of an iceberg, the Invisible Web is all that lays beneath the surface of the water. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/rdn-oai/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/rdn-oai/ The RDN is a collaborative network of subject gateways, funded for use by UK Higher and Further Education by the JISC (though it is used much more widely). Each subject gateway, as part of its service, provides the end user with access to databases of descriptions of freely available, high quality, Web resources. As each resource described in the database is hand picked by subject specialists, following well developed guidelines, it is hoped that a resource discovered through the RDN will be of great value to an end-user. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/techwatch/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/techwatch/ Content management? That’s what librarians do, right? But we’ve already got a library management system (LMS) – why should we consider a content management system (CMS)? The second initial is perhaps misleading – “manipulation” rather than “management” might better summarise the goals of a CMS. Content creation and content re-purposing are fundamental aspects which tend to lie outside the current LMS domain. Actually, from the point of view of workflow (and to lesser extent content re-purposing), the CMS and LMS have much in common. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/editorial/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/editorial/ Welcome to the December/January issue of Ariadne. A focus of this issue of Ariadne is the Open Archives Initiative and the wider implications of the techniques and technology associated with it. A major impetus behind the take-up of the OAI idea is the wish to make research available more widely and more quickly than before, and also to counter the problems created by the nature of existing academic publishing. As David Pearson writes in our lead article on digitization strategy, ‘…. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/ref-books/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/ref-books/ Reference books have been ‘published’ on the web for some years. Several hundred dictionaries are freely available. Many specialist encyclopaedias and subject reference works have been converted to become experimental web services(1).This wave of reference publishing follows no concerted plan. There is no formal market for these services and perhaps there never was an expectation of profit. The early development of the web has been like this. Most of the notable achievements lacked a clear commercial motivation and this has led to the extraordinarily rich and varied choice that the web provides. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/web-focus/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/web-focus/ Over the past 30 years or so we have seen a wide range of computer devices. Those of us over 40 may have distant memories of paper tape and punch cards. Over time these were replaced by terminals, followed by VDUs. Although the VT100 terminal became a de facto standard developments still continued, especially in the area of graphical devices. In the early 1980s personal computers came along. Within the UK the BBC microcomputer and various offerings from Sinclair had some degree of popularity. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/maccoll/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/maccoll/ This report covers a selection of the papers at the above conference, from those which I chose and was able to attend in a three-strand conference held over three days (with two additional days for workshops, which I did not attend). It includes the three keynote papers, as well as the paper which won the Vannevar Bush award for best conference paper. The conference was held in Roanoke, Virginia, in the Roanoke Hotel and Conference Center, which is owned by Virginia Tech (located in Blacksburg, some 40 miles away). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/gardner/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/gardner/ What are Web Services?The term web services has gaining visibility in recent months, there has been a W3C workshop on web services [1] and the big industry players such as IBM, Microsoft and Sun have been announcing their web services strategies. So what’s it all about and should you be involved? This article aims to be a starting point for answering these questions. Well, the term web services is fairly self-explanatory, it refers to accessing services over the web. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/miller/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/miller/ In July of this year, Interoperability Focus [1] organised a meeting at the Office of the e–Envoy [2], the Cabinet Office unit responsible for driving forward the UK’s e–Government initiatives. Across an increasing number of initiatives and programmes, there is a growing recognition of the need for common ‘architectures’ within which truly useful applications and services may be constructed. Partly, these architectures form a philosophical basis within which developments may be undertaken. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/robinson/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/robinson/ The UK Collection Description Focus (1) was launched on 1 June 2001. It is a national post, jointly funded for a twelve-month period by the Joint Information Systems Committee/Distributed National Electronic Resource (JISC/DNER) (2) , the Research Support Libraries Program (RSLP) (3) and the British Library (4). The Focus aims to improve co-ordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions and sectors. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/open-archives/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/open-archives/ A one day Open Archives event co-ordinated by the DNER, CURL and UKOLN was held on Wednesday 11th July at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, Birdcage Walk, London. Birdcage walk is in a very impressive part of London, circumscribed by Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and the Houses of Parliament. Lucky for us the hot sun added to the splendor of the location. Catherine Grout giving the opening presentation The Institute of Mechanical Engineers building itself is also very grand. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/newsline/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/newsline/ JISC publishes three important documentsThe Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) promotes the innovative application and use of information systems and information technology in Higher and Further education across the UK. The JISC has published three new documents. These are the draft 3-year Collection Strategy, the Collections Development Policy and the Final Report from the JCEI (JISC Committee for Electronic Information) Charging Working Group Collection Strategy The JISC will continue to procure and make available on a subscription basis a collection of high quality electronic resources of relevance to learning, teaching, and research in higher and further education. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/web-focus/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/web-focus/ The fifth Institutional Web Management Workshop was held at Queen's University Belfast on 25-27 June 2001. This year's workshop, which had the theme "Organising Chaos", was the largest to date with 150 delegates. It was also the longest workshop, lasting from Monday morning until Wednesday lunchtime. The extra half-day compared with the previous three workshops allowed us to run a full day of interactive parallel sessions. The workshop is aimed primarily at members of institutional Web management teams within UK HE and FE institutions, although participants from related communities are also welcome. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/ntexplorer/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/ntexplorer/ Previous Windows NT Explorer articles featured in Ariadne have looked at some of the essentials tools and technologies for web development on the Microsoft Windows platform, namely Internet Information Server [1] and Active Server Pages [2]. The focus this issue is the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). The protocol is a core technology in the provision of web services across the Internet. While SOAP is not a Microsoft specific technology, the protocol is being embraced by the company as it focuses effort on the provision of web services. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/editorial/ Thu, 21 Jun 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/editorial/ Here in the UK we are living in the aftermath of the recent General election. Although apathy was the order of the day and few seats actually changed hands, important changes have been made that are worth mentioning here in Ariadne. In a Cabinet reshuffle the government has replaced the previous Culture secretary, Chris Smith, with Tessa Jowell, formerly a minister of state in the Department for Education and Employment. Working alongside her in the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) will be Tessa Blackstone, also a previous minister in the DFEE. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/gold/ Thu, 21 Jun 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/gold/ In the BeginningWay back in 1998 the University of Bath’s Centre for the Development of New Technologies in Learning became part of a three institution consortium responsible for the TLTP Phase 3 ‘Project GOLD’ [1]. GOLD stands for Guidance Online for those Learning at a Distance. The lead partner was the Royal College of Nursing Institute (the Higher Education arm of the RCN) supported by the Open Learning Foundation and the University of Bath. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/graphics/ Thu, 21 Jun 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/graphics/ To view the Scalable Vector Graphics in this article you will need a viewer. The Adobe® SVG Viewer is a plug-in that will allow your Web browser to render SVG and is available free from the Adobe Web site. IntroductonThe early browsers for the Web were predominantly aimed at retrieval of textual information. Whilst Tim Berners-Lee's original browser for the NeXT computer allowed images to be viewed, they appeared in a separate window and were not an integral part of the Web page. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/cms/ Thu, 21 Jun 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/cms/ A publishing revolution on the Web?Just three or four years ago the Web community was getting used to the idea that the way we would work in future would be radically different from the way we work now. The world of coalface flatfile html markup would begin to disappear in favour of collaborative working, managed workflow, document versioning, on the fly pages constructed out of application independent xml chunks, site management tools and push-button publishing via multiple formats - html, xml, pdf, print, etc. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/web-focus/ Thu, 21 Jun 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/web-focus/ Previous Web Focus articles have provided trip reports on the International World Wide Web conferences [1] [2] [3] and [4]. These reports have commented on the birth of new developments such as XML, RDF and WAP and the mobile Web. So what was hot from WWW10? Well the weather certainly was hot - and very humid. The 1,200+ delegates were very appreciative of the air-conditioning in the Hong Kong Conference Centre, located on Hong Kong island, next to the harbour (see Figure 1). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/27/news/ Fri, 23 Mar 2001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/27/news/ The Bridgeman Art Library acquires photographic archive of the Hamburg Kunsthalle Museum, GermanyThe Bridgeman Art Library announced today its acquisition of the photographic archive of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. All of the museum’s works will be available through Bridgeman on an exclusive basis, providing image users with a rich source of German art. Highlights from the museum’s four great galleries include a collection of magnificent mediaeval panel paintings, masterpieces by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich and important works by Paul Klee, Max Beckman and Edvard Munch. 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/case-studies/ Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/case-studies/ Agora is one of the five Hybrid Library Projects that began in January 1998, forming part of phase 3 of the elib programme investigating issues surrounding the integration of digital and traditional library resources. It is a consortium-based project, led by the University of East Anglia; partners are UKOLN [1], Fretwell Downing Informatics and CERLIM (the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management). The project also works with several associate groups: libraries, service providers and systems developers. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/exam-papers/ Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/exam-papers/ The George Edwards Library at the University of Surrey is close to completing a project for providing on-line access to the University’s exam papers for members of the University. Although other institutions are already providing electronic access to their exam papers, the system designed for use at Surrey is believed to be innovative in a number of ways. The overall achievements are: Simple and efficient method of delivery of electronic exam papersWill makes papers available to multiple users 24 hours per day from any site with Internet access on or off campusA non Java version for those who require itUse of Adobe Acrobat PDF to view papersAbility to watermark papers if required by SchoolsConforms to Dublin Core metadata standards (for more information see the Dublin Core site at http://purl. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/metadata/ Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/metadata/ The Cedars conference, "Preservation 2000: an International Conference on the Preservation and Long Term Accessibility of Digital Materials," was held at the Viking Moat House Hotel in York on 7-8 December 2000. There were over 150 participants, about one half from outside the UK. As a prelude to the conference proper, a one-day workshop entitled "Information Infrastructures for Digital Preservation" was held at the same venue on the 6 December. This workshop mostly concerned preservation metadata and attracted over 70 participants. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/review/ Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/review/ Digital Imaging: A Practical Handbook is very much a 'how to' guide for those about to embark on a digitisation project, and it offers a complete picture of the workflow process of a digital imaging project from its inception to the final maintenance and archiving of the end product. It is aimed at information professionals and librarians managing such a venture, but is also of value to researchers and students. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/web-focus/ Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/web-focus/ What's the future for Web browsing? Is it the PC running some flavour of MS Windows?. Will the Linux platform take off on the desktop? Or will the Macintosh come back into fashion? Many statistics on browser usage would suggest that the MS Windows platform has won the battle. The proportion of platforms illustrated in Figure 1 (which shows accesses to the Cultivate Interactive by graphical browsers) is probably not too untypical (information available at [1]). 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/decomate-ii/ Sat, 23 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/decomate-ii/ The Decomate II project produced a working demonstrator system and service providing access to distributed, heterogeneous Economics information sources. The conference was held at the Casa de Convalescència, part of The Hospital Santa Pau, one of Barcelona’s great "Modernista" architectural monuments. Following a warm welcome from Carme Picallo, Vice-Rector for Research of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Hans Geleijnse of Tilburg University and Decomate II Project Director, gave the keynote speech. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/editorial/ Sat, 23 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/editorial/ The Higher Education (HE) community interest in information technology remains very much the same as it was when the web first appeared: networked access to high quality (and quality assured) information resources. Current activities in the UK (the RDN, the DNER, HERO, etc) are logical developments of these core interests. But in the few years which have passed, the concept of how such information ought to be accessed and what the nature of the interface might be (at both superficial and deep levels) has been discussed in various digital library forums and refined into a number of practical demonstrator applications and projects (the various hybrid library projects, the Agora project, etc). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/rydberg-cox/ Sat, 23 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/rydberg-cox/ Digital libraries can be an extremely effective method of extending the services of a traditional library by enabling activities such as access to materials outside the physical confines of the library [1]. The true benefit of a digital library, however, comes not from the replication and enhancement of traditional library functions, but rather in the ability to make possible tasks that would not be possible outside the electronic environment, such as the hypertextual linking of related texts, full text searching of holdings, and the integration of knowledge management, data visualization, and geographic information tools with the texts in the digital library. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/cimi/ Sat, 23 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/cimi/ Like libraries, museums face the daunting task of preserving our cultural heritage, whilst also striving with the often conflicting need to make that cultural heritage available to us today. Perhaps differently from libraries, interpretation plays an important part in the work of museums, where exhibitions are often designed around the telling of one or more stories about the past in order to place objects within their historical context. Possibly even more so than in the library sector, the information revolution has had a profound effect upon the ways in which museums manage information, whether for internal use within their rich collection management systems, or externally in the content made available on web sites, in 'exhiblets', or in data exchanged between institutions or embedded within various educational resources such as CD–ROMs. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/brett/ Sat, 23 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/brett/ Research and Education, especially higher education, have been key players in the development of various information technologies including the Internet. While advances in networking, computing, scientific research and education applications have been proceeding at a rapid pace, what has been lacking is a coordinated effort to capture, collect, or otherwise systematically organize the experience, knowledge and other product of the work done. We believe that a Knowledge Management Clearinghouse (aka Klearinghouse) can serve as a coordinating entity for the identification and use of tools for knowledge management in real time, any time, and over time. 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/25/xml-europe/ Sat, 23 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/xml-europe/ XML Europe 2000 was held at the Palis des Congres de Paris June 13 to 15, 2000. The XML Show, hosted by IDEAlliance provided attendees with the largest exposition of XML tools ever held in Europe. Fifty two (52) booths filled the show floor. The breakdown of participants was: XML Publication Software (8) XML Editing/Authoring (5) XML Data/Content Management (7) XML eBusiness Solutions (7) XML Middleware (4) XML Services (4) XML Workflow (2) XML Organizations (4) Miscellaneous (11) Highlights Infoteria is a middleware vendor in the B2B market space. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/zope/ Sat, 23 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/zope/ MotivationI would be surprised if most people don’t feel a sense of achievement when they author their first Web page. It’s the first thing you ever made which potentially the rest of the world can see. Others learn about your new skill and before you know it you’ve become the departmental webperson and are buried in an avalanche of other people’s content to “put on the Web”. The chore of document conversion and the burden of information maintenance quickly dispel the euphoria of your first experience of authoring for the Web. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/editorial/ Thu, 22 Jun 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/editorial/ Lorcan Dempsey FarewellLorcan Dempsey, Director of UKOLN for the past six years, has recently moved up to head the newly constituted DNER (the Distributed National Electronic Resource), and is now based in London. This is UKOLN’s loss, but a great plus for the DNER. Ray Lester, head of UKOLN’s management committee, points out that Lorcan: … has presided over a remarkable period of growth and diversification during his almost 6 years as Director of UKOLN. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/oed-tech/ Thu, 22 Jun 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/oed-tech/ Ariadne has already described the long-term task of revising the Oxford English Dictionary and reviewed OED Online at its launch in March this year, but the editor judged, rightly, that there must be a hidden story on the making of the web site. This article sets out to tell that story, describing what was technically involved in turning a twenty-three volume print work into an online publication, and recording how this generation of publishers benefited from visionary groundwork undertaken fifteen years ago which meant that the hardest part of going online - preparing the content - was three-quarters done before they’d heard of the Web. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/tei/ Thu, 22 Jun 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/tei/ The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) was originally established in 1987 with the goal of creating a community-based standard for text encoding and interchange. It came into being as the result of a perception in many different parts of the academic research community that the rising tide of digitized media (largely known, in those distant days, as "electronic" or even "machine-readable" texts) threatened to engulf everything in a war of competing formats and encoding systems. 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). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/epanet/ Tue, 21 Dec 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/epanet/ The civilizations of the ancient Near East produced the world's first written texts. In both Egypt and Mesopotamia, recognizable texts begin to appear in the late fourth millennum B.C.[1] A well developed system of numerical tabulation combined with a varied and sophisticated repertoire of sealings and seal impression is evident even earlier across a wide geographical range in Western Asia[2] and evidence from recent archaeological discoveries in Egypt promises to push the origins of writing even further into antiquity. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/planet-sosig/ Tue, 21 Dec 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/planet-sosig/ The purpose of this article is to introduce The Question Bank contents and situate the resource in the context of its Information Space, that is its relationship to other projects that aim to make social surveys more accessible. I have the subsidiary aim of using this text to present the choices and decisions that need to be identified, preferably before undertaking the introduction of a medium sized web-based information resource. I aim to be decidedly non-technical, however many of the problems the Question bank team has overcome have been solved because of the increasing flexibility that newer software offers. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/das/ Tue, 21 Dec 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/das/ Public libraries serve their communities by fulfilling seven basic roles, including knowledge archival, the preservation and maintenance of culture, knowledge dissemination, knowledge sharing, information retrieval, education, and social interaction [1]. Each of these roles offers the general public the opportunity to recognize and view libraries as an integral part of a democratic society where access to free information has been (and still is) both expected and demanded. By comparison, community networks also have similar ideals for serving the public. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/web-mirror/ Tue, 21 Dec 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/web-mirror/ On 1st August 1999 the UK Mirror Service [1] replaced HENSA as the JISC [2] funded mirror service for the UK academic community. The new service is run by the same teams at Kent and Lancaster that supported the HENSAs, but it is not merely a revamp of the HENSA sites; there are some fundamental changes. This article takes a look at the implementation of the service and our plans for the future. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/web-editor/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/web-editor/ I work in a discipline where scholars are as likely to be interested in a three-quarter-century-old article written in an obscure journal with a circulation of a thousand copies as they are in a lavish and masterly new publication of an international exhibition of never-before-seen artifacts. The archaeologies of scholarship on the ancient Near East are complex and arcane. The skills required to interpret them are taken for granted on the assumption that university students should already know how to use a library (as any schoolboy knows. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/web-focus/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/web-focus/ The "Institutional Web Management: The Next Steps" workshop took place at Goldsmiths College, London on 7-9 September 1999. This was the third annual event for institutional web managers which has been organised by UK Web Focus. The first workshop was held over 2 day (16/17 July 1997) at Kings College London. As described in the workshop report published in Ariadne [1] the event attracted a total of 95 participants. The workshop provided a valuable opportunity for web editors to meet their peers at other institutions and compare experiences. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/nt-explorer/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/nt-explorer/ IIS has been around for quite some time now. IIS 2.0 can be found on the Windows NT 4.0 Server installation CD-ROM. This version of IIS was pretty basic, and changing advanced settings usually involved messing around with the Windows registry. Version 3.0 was little different from 2.0, but it did see the introduction of server-side scripting through the use of the innovative Active Server Pages [1]. By contrast, version 4. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/z3950/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/z3950/ Z39.50. Despite certain nominative similarities, it's not a robot from that other blockbuster of the summer, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, but rather the cuddly and approachable name for an important standard of relevance to many working with information resources in a distributed environment. In this particular summer blockbuster (Ariadne, to which I'm sure many readers frequently refer in the same paragraph as Star Wars), I'll attempt to remove some of the mystique surrounding this much-maligned standard, and illustrate some of what it can be used for. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/20/ims/ Mon, 21 Jun 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/20/ims/ “IMS is a global coalition of academic, commercial and government organizations, working together to define the Internet architecture for learning.” Excerpt from the IMS project website [1]. IMS was originally a US-based organisation but now wishes to be seen as an international effort. In the UK, the JISC is an investment partner and a UK IMS centre has been set up [2]. Recently, I attended two UK IMS events: the IMS Developer Workshop (March 23 - 24 1999, Bath) and the IMS/eLib Concertation Day (May 4 1999, London). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/20/metadata/ Mon, 21 Jun 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/20/metadata/ The Metadata Workshop held in Luxembourg on the 12 April was the third in an ongoing series of such meetings. The first Metadata Workshop was held in December 1997 and included a tutorial on metadata provided by UKOLN, some project presentations and break-out sessions on various metadata issues [1, 2]. The second workshop, held in June 1998, concentrated more on technical and strategic issues [3]. Around 50 people attended the third workshop, mostly drawn from organisations involved in European Union funded projects supplemented by a few Commission staff. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/20/bopac/ Mon, 21 Jun 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/20/bopac/ This article attempts to draw some practical lessons for those involved with clumps (or thinking about them) from our experiences on the BOPAC2 project [1]. BOPAC2 was a British Library funded project, that was investigating the problems of large and complex retrievals from Z39.50 [2] searches especially from multiple targets. Although the funded stage of BOPAC2 is over the system is still under development and available on the web and I would urge people to try the sort of examples I will mention below (and give us feedback). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/20/web-focus/ Mon, 21 Jun 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/20/web-focus/ The Eighth World Wide Web Conference (WWW8) was on a smaller scale than in the past few years. The numbers of delegates seemed to be down, and there was no accompanying exhibition. The conference appeared to be refocussing on the web research community, with delegates from commercial companies more likely to be software developers than marketing types. This refocussing also seemed to be reflected in the conference papers, which, as a number of people commented, seemed to be of a higher quality this year. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/19/web-editor/ Fri, 19 Mar 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/19/web-editor/ Maintenance problems signal a painful truth for Web Editors (or those occupying similar roles). They need to change the institutions within which they work. As I learn more about the institution within which I work I frequently encounter a recurring truism: those with the most to offer in terms of content are often the least able to publish it via the web. Instead, they are skilled at managing a digital to print workflow i. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/19/web-focus/ Fri, 19 Mar 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/19/web-focus/ The WebWatch project [1], which was based at UKOLN, involved the development and use of a variety of tools to analyse web resources and web servers. During the early development of the software, individual summaries (particularly of outliers in the statistical data) were often required in order to check that the software was working correctly. Initially summaries were obtained using simple Unix scripts. For example the urlget script displayed the HTTP headers for a resource as illustrated below: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/18/emmott-sgml/ Sat, 19 Dec 1998 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/18/emmott-sgml/ It was clear from the crowd gathered in the reception area of the Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre that SGML’s appeal is far reaching. From grey suits to combat trousers, the first of the day’s 180 attendees represented at a glance the diversity of domains into which SGML extends. The conversation evident before the opening talk confirmed the cooperative spirit underlying the phenomenal growth of SGML’s prodigies - HTML and XML. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/18/editorials/ Sat, 19 Dec 1998 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/18/editorials/ This is sadly the last of the parallel print and web publication of Ariadne - for the moment, at least. Ariadne will however continue as a web magazine. The print edition has finished in some style, with a publication twice the size of all earlier copies. Attendees at the eLib "Information Ecologies" conference in York earlier this month already know this, since we arranged for advance copies to be available for that event. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/17/ukolug/ Fri, 18 Sep 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/17/ukolug/ Celebrating a significant birthday, this conference featured retrospection as well as prediction and picked up on some of the repeating patterns inherent in electronic information and retrieval systems. Charles Oppenheim began with a retrospective on the birth and development of UKOLUG (Birth of a Generation), commenting on the importance of archives despite having been there himself - his memory and the official record differing somewhat alarmingly. He conveyed the sense of frantic activity during the early years of online and the ability that UKOLUG had to shape the emergent industry - a theme picked up the next day by John December who was to challenge librarians to shape the web. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/17/web-focus/ Fri, 18 Sep 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/17/web-focus/ In July 1997 a 2 day workshop on Running An Institutional Web Service was held at King’s College London. As reported in Ariadne issue 11 [1] the workshop proved very successful. Comments received on the workshop evaluation form indicated that participants would have likely a longer workshop and would have liked certain topics, including web design, database integration and management issues, to be covered in more depth. In addition several participants would have likely more time to be devoted to group sessions. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/17/what-is/ Fri, 18 Sep 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/17/what-is/ The 3 day workshop on Institutional Web Management held at the University of Newcastle on 15-17 September is reviewed elsewhere in this issue of Ariadne [1]. As mentioned in the review, the use of backend databases for storing and managing information to be made available on the Web was felt to be extremely important, especially for institutional web sites, which provide the virtual view of an institution for many, including potential students. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/16/cover/ Sat, 18 Jul 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/16/cover/ The Internet comes wrapped up with so much hype and vested interest that it is difficult to gauge whether it is changing much in the libraries, workplaces, and industries around the country. This makes it fertile ground for researchers. The Media was chosen as the area to study the phenomenon because it seemed likely that it would be hit very hard, one way or another. Furthermore, it seemed from the statements pouring out of the industry that nobody really had a clue about the outcome. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/16/editorials/webeditorial.html Sat, 18 Jul 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/16/editorials/webeditorial.html Ariadne welcomes Bernadette Daly, who has joined UKOLN as Information Officer, and will be co-editing the web version of the magazine. Bernadette comes to us from Canada, and will be fielding much of the general UKOLN web service, in addition to work on Ariadne. On the 30th of July, a web form will be inserted into this issue of the Web version of Ariadne, linked from the contents page, as well as this editorial page. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/16/web-focus/ Sat, 18 Jul 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/16/web-focus/ Since February 1998 HTML 4.0 [1], CSS 2.0[2], the Mathematical Markup Language MathML [3] and the Extensible Markup Language XML [4] have all become W3C Recommendations. These web protocols, all of which are concerned with the way in which information can be represented and displayed, were initially Working Drafts which were developed by the appropriate W3C Working Group. The Working Drafts were then made publicly available as W3C Proposed Recommendations. Following a review period the Proposed Recommendations were voted on by W3C member organisations. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/16/what-is/ Sat, 18 Jul 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/16/what-is/ BackgroundThe What Is …? article in the last edition of Ariadne gave an introduction to XML, the Extensible Markup Language [1]. XML has been developed to overcome HTML’s lack of extensibility - with XML you will be able to define your own element tags. We have already seen a variety of communities defining element tags for use within their community, such as MathML [2] and MusicML [3]. Besides lacking extensibility, HTML is also limited in its hyperlinking functionality. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/15/events/stakis.html Mon, 18 May 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/15/events/stakis.html On the 8th May, following almost immediately after their MODELS 7 Workshop, UKOLN hosted a half-day seminar entitled “RDF: What is it all about?”. RDF, or Resource Description Framework, is one of the latest TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) to emerge from the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), and is of particular pertinence to the library and collection management communities as one of its intended applications is the interchange of catalogue or metadata. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/15/editorials/webeditorial.html Mon, 18 May 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/15/editorials/webeditorial.html This issue of Ariadne features the reappearance of “Get Tooled Up” - a section focussing on technical matters. Ian Peacock’s article on the Robot Exclusion Protocol explains the importance of, and how to write, the simple files which prevent web robots from trampling all over your server - provided of course that they have been given some elementary house training before being let loose. Showing Robots the Door also features a fully operational parsing tool for exclusion files. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/15/web-focus/ Mon, 18 May 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/15/web-focus/ Australia is a long way to go for a conference. What were you doing there? I attended the conference in my role as UK Web Focus and the JISC representative on the World Wide Web Consortium. Attendenance at the World Wide Web conference provides me with an opportunity to monitor the latest Web developments and keep the community informed. What were the highlights of the conference? In a three letter acronym - RDF! http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/15/what-is/ Mon, 18 May 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/15/what-is/ About XMLWhat is XML? XML stands for the Extensible Markup Language. XML has been designed to address a number of deficiencies in HTML. Which deficiencies in particular? HTML is not extensible. Submitting proposals for extensions to HTML can be a very lengthy process. Browser software vendors can short-circuit the standardisation process by introducing their own extensions, but this has caused problems, as we have seen with controversial extensions such as Netscape’s <BLINK> and Microsoft’s <MARQUEE> elements. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/14/what-is/ Thu, 19 Mar 1998 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/14/what-is/ What is RDF? It’s the Resource Description Framework. Does that help? No? RDF is the latest acronym to add to your list, one that is set to gain in significance in the future. At present though it is early days for RDF and little accessible information is available for the interested reader. This short summary will try to outline some key points regarding RDF and point to available further information. What is certain is that this summary will go out of date quickly, RDF is ‘work in progress’ and is an area which is undergoing rapid development and change. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/11/web-focus/ Thu, 18 Sep 1997 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/11/web-focus/ About The Workshop Excellent; good opportunity to update knowledge and meet other, A much needed workshop. Very useful to hear from speakers and finding out about other sites from discussion groups. Same again next year please! , Extremely useful and timely . Just three of the comments received from participants of the workshop on Running An Institutional Web Service. The workshop was held at King’s College London from lunchtime on Wednesday, 16th July until lunchtime the following day. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/10/dublin/ Fri, 18 Jul 1997 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/10/dublin/ The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (the Dublin Core) [1] is a 15 element metadata set that is primarily intended to aid resource discovery on the Web. The elements in the Dublin Core are TITLE, SUBJECT, DESCRIPTION, CREATOR, PUBLISHER, CONTRIBUTOR, DATE, TYPE, FORMAT, IDENTIFIER, SOURCE, LANGUAGE, RELATION, COVERAGE and RIGHTS. As we begin to consider some initial implementations using the Dublin Core we need to consider how best to manage large amounts of metadata across a Web-site. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/9/web-focus/ Sun, 18 May 1997 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/9/web-focus/ The Sixth International World Wide Web Conference took place from 7-11th April 1997 in Santa Clara, California, USA. I attended the conference in my capacity as the JISC representative on the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium). About 1,800 people attended the conference. This figure was down on the last two years, due possibly to the close proximity of other conferences - the Javasoft conference attracted about 8,000 delagates and the Microsoft Hardware Engineering conference about 15,000 delegates. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/8/electronic-formats/ Wed, 19 Mar 1997 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/8/electronic-formats/ Every day, subscribers to the the NewJour mailing list [1] receive notification of new Internet-available electronic serials. The NewJour definition of a serial covers everything from journals to magazines and newsletters; from the British Accounting Review to Ariadne, to The (virtual) Baguette and I Love My Nanny. Some days, a dozen or more publications are announced. As of 13th February 1997, the NewJour archive contained 3,240 items. Most of these electronic serials, or e-serials, along with most other electronic publications currently available on the World Wide Web, are stored and represented using one or more of a relatively limited number of document formats. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/7/wire/ Sun, 19 Jan 1997 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/7/wire/ What are you doing now? I'm studying for a Masters in Knowledge Based Systems at Edinburgh University's Department of Artificial Intelligence. ...and what where you doing before? Before this academic year I was a software engineer working for Nokia Telecommunications in Cambridge on a variety of network management products. Why the jump from the networkie side of a telecoms company to doing a masters degree? Mainly for financial reasons, I think.