Table of contents: issue37

Unicode and Historic Scripts

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Deborah Anderson provides us an overview of the progress made in bringing historic scripts to the Unicode Standard.

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.

Trends in Self-Posting of Research Material Online by Academic Staff

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Theo Andrew sheds some light on current trends in posting research material online with a case study from The University of Edinburgh.

With the rapid uptake of digital media changing the way scholarly communication is perceived, we are in a privileged position to be part of a movement whose decisions now will help to decide ultimately future courses of action. A number of strategies have recently emerged to facilitate greatly enhanced access to traditional scholarly content, e.g. open access journals and institutional repositories.

Updated JISC Guides Are Now Available

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Emma Beer describes the new JISC Resource Guides.

The huge growth in Internet resources to support learning, teaching and research can make the business of finding high-quality relevant resources both time-consuming and frustrating. JISC Resource Guides, and a dedicated team of Resource Guide Advisers across seven subject areas direct researchers in UK Higher Education to a selection of key, high-quality resources.

Delivering OAI Records As RSS: An IMesh Toolkit Module for Facilitating Resource Sharing

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Monica Duke provides an overview of a means of providing records in RSS through the use of an IMesh Toolkit module that supports resource sharing. The content of this article was presented at the 4th Open Archives Forum Workshop

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.

Ebooks in UK Libraries: Where Are We Now?

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Penny Garrod brings us up to date on developments in ebooks.

"I suspect that more words are being published about the ebook phenomenon in print than have actually been placed into ebooks so far." [1]

Experiences of Harvesting Web Resources in Engineering Using Automatic Classification

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Kjell Jansson, Jessica Lindholm and Tomas Schoenthal describe the work in setting up a Web index that uses automatic classification as a means for the selection of resources.

The story behind Engine-e [1], a recently created robot-generated Web index, is best told by starting in 1994 with the development and maintenance of EELS (Engineering Electronic Library, Sweden) [2], a manually indexed quality-controlled subject gateway in Engineering. EELS was accompanied by the experimental robot-generated index, "All" Engineering [3], created within the DESIRE framework [4]. The solution used already in "All" Engineering is similar to that of Engine-e, but with some distinct differences.

Towards a Typology for Portals

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Miller looks at some of the services we call portals, and argues for better words to describe them.

Regular readers of Ariadne and related publications possibly feel more than a little overwhelmed by the current deluge of portal-related literature; a deluge for which my colleagues and I on the PORTAL Project [1] must of course accept some responsibility.

DAEDALUS: Initial Experiences With EPrints and DSpace at the University of Glasgow

editor — Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000

William Nixon provides an overview of the DAEDALUS initial experience with the GNU EPrints and DSpace software and the decision to employ both.

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.