Overview of content related to 'data'

ISBN-13: New Number on the Block

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Ann Chapman outlines the planned changes to the ISBN standard and its impact on the information community and the book trade.

The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a unique machine-readable identification number, defined in ISO Standard 2108, which is applied to books. As a result of electronic publishing and other changes in the publishing industry, the numbering capacity of the ISBN system is being consumed at a much faster rate than was originally anticipated when the standard was designed in the late 1960s. While we will not run out of ISBNs tomorrow, it will happen before too long and plans are already in hand to provide a solution before the crisis point is reached.

Improving Communications Within JISC through News Aggregation

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Paul Davey explains what JISC is doing to improve communications through more effective news promotion. Roddy MacLeod and Malcolm Moffat examine the technology EEVL has developed in this area.

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.

Developing Portal Services and Evaluating How Users Want to Use Them: The CREE Project

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Chris Awre, Matthew J Dovey, Jon Hunter, William Kilbride and Ian Dolphin describe the JISC-funded Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment (CREE) Project and its user and technical investigations to examine how users wish to use library search services.

The JISC-funded PORTAL Project [1] examined and established which services users wished to have made available through an institutional portal. The results of this project have provided firm guidance to institutional portal developers in planning the services they wished to present. In particular, there was common demand amongst users for access to library-based services and resources within a portal environment.

The Dawning of DARE: A Shared Experience

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Annemiek van der Kuil and Martin Feijen describe the first year of the DARE Project and its foundation of the OAI repositories of Dutch academic output.

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.

DARE has several goals:

What Do Application Profiles Reveal about the Learning Object Metadata Standard?

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Jean Godby assesses the customised subsets of metadata elements that have been defined by 35 projects using the LOM standard to describe e-learning resources.

A Metadata Standard for Learning Objects

As 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.

How the Use of Standards Is Transforming Australian Digital Libraries

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Debbie Campbell explains how the exploitation of recent standards has allowed the National Library of Australia to digitise its collections and host federated search services and provide an improved service.

The National Library of Australia (NLA) has been able to achieve new business practices such as digitising its collections and hosting federated search services by exploiting recent standards including the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), handles for persistent identification, and metadata schemas for new types of content. Each instantiation of the OAI-PMH opens up new ways of creating and managing our digital libraries while making them more accessible for learning, teaching and research purposes.

Planet-SOSIG

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Angela Joyce shares her personal impressions from the recent European Digital Libraries Conference in Bath; Emma Place introduces a new seminar series to support online information seeking in the social sciences.

A Digital Day in Bath

On a stormy wet Tuesday, I battled my way through the Bath University campus to attend the 2004 European Conference on Digital Libraries. The keynote address by Neil McLean from IMS Australia was called The Ecology of Repository Services: A Cosmic View and it lived up to its name, being a wide-ranging look at the explosion of interest in digital resources and e-learning. People are just starting to think about the lifecycle of online resources and how to manage them.

News from BIOME

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Jenny Hall and Donald Mackay report on recent news form BIOME, the Health and Life Sciences hub of the Resource Discovery Network.

BIOME Hot Topics

BIOME contains a wealth of information on a wide range of topics in the health and life sciences and we aim to keep introducing new features in line with user needs. As of October 2004 we are trialling a new fortnightly feature - 'Hot Topics'.

Search Engines: New and Developing Search Engines

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Phil Bradley looks at some existing search engines and also some new ones to bring you up to date on what is happening in the world of Internet search engines.

In the last edition of Ariadne, I wrote about a few search engines that had come to my attention. Obviously the summer months are a fruitful period of development for search engine producers, because I've got a new crop to write about again! There are also some useful Web pages about search engines and developments in existing search engines that I've also discovered, so I'll be making mention of those as well.

Web Focus: QA Focus Has Finished - Let's Start Embedding QA

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Brian Kelly reviews the JISC-funded QA Focus Project and argues that developers should be using quality assurance principles.

About QA Focus

The JISC-funded QA Focus Project officially finished on 31 July 2004. The project, which started on 1 January 2002, supported JISC's digital library programmes. QA Focus developed a quality assurance (QA) framework which could be used by projects funded by JISC's Information Environment programmes to ensure that project deliverables were functional, widely accessible and interoperable.

ECDL 2004: A Digital Librarian's Report

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Jessie Hey reports on the 8th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries held at the University of Bath in September 2004.

This year it was the turn of the UK to host this major European conference and researchers and librarians took the opportunity to recharge and hear about and debate the latest research and technology advances in digital libraries. There were 47 peer-reviewed papers - a 32% acceptance rate. Remarkably papers were received from 27 countries.

ECDL2004: 4th International Web Archiving Workshop, September 2004

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Michael Day reports on the 4th International Web Archiving Workshop held at the University of Bath in September as part of ECDL 2004.

An annual Web archiving workshop has been held in conjunction with the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) since the 5th conference, held in September 2001 [1]. The University of Bath, UK hosted the 4th workshop in the series - now renamed the International Web Archiving Workshop - on 16 September 2004 [2]. Julien Masanès of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) welcomed around 60 delegates to Bath to listen to ten presentations and hoped that these would prompt much useful discussion.

Digital Resources for the Humanities

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Alastair Dunning reviews for us this year's conference on Digital Resources in the Humanities held at the University of Newcastle over 5-8 September 2004.

Project Management: Can there be a duller two words to start off any kind of article? Well, possibly 'economic costing' or 'stakeholder pensions', but project management is not far behind. But judging from presentations given at this year's Digital Resources in the Humanities Conference, it's a term with which many of those undertaking digitisation projects are going to have to become familiar.

News and Events

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.

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:

Book Review: Libraries Without Walls 5

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

David Parkes reviews the fifth compilation of the biennial Library Without Walls Conference. He finds how far we have come and how far we have to go in delivering services to distributed learners.

This is the 5th collection of papers from the biennial Libraries Without Walls Conference (LWW5). Reference to the preceding 4 volumes published in 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2002 respectively is rewarding to see how discourse and practice has developed.

Book Review: Knowledge Management Lessons Learned

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Martin White praises the work of the editors on the 32 essays covering how KM initiatives can deliver tangible outcomes and takes a practical and balanced view of their overall value.

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. On that basis alone, the co-editors deserve considerable credit that the book exists at all.

Book Review: The Information Society - A Study of Continuity and Change

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000

Lise Foster finds this a useful scene setter for the novice and valuable reminder for the professional of the challenges facing today's librarian.

In 2000, John Feather concluded the 3rd edition certain that libraries would endure as concrete entities due to the investment of time and money they represent and as bookstores. In this latest edition he is no longer sure, describing the library as no longer a location, but a concept and asking such tough questions as what place do librarians occupy in the context of these new developments and what challenges to our fundamental attitudes and skills must we overcome as we adapt to changing times.