Table of contents: issue38

The AHDS Is Evolving: Changes at the Arts and Humanities Data Service

editor — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Alastair Dunning describes the changes afoot at the AHDS and how it intends to adapt to the changes in both technology and the needs of its stakeholders.

Established in 1995, the Arts and Humanities Data Service [1] was created with the objective of developing an infrastructure to manage the growing number of digital resources being created within the arts and humanities.

One medium for discussing this initial development was Ariadne, and Daniel Greenstein and Jennifer Trant's 1996 article [2] gave a detailed account of the aims and organisation of the AHDS.

The JISC 5/99 Programme: What's in a Number?

editor — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Rachel Bruce and Balviar Notay give an overview of the outputs and influences of the JISC 5/99 Learning and Teaching and Infrastructure Programme.

The 5/99 Programme, as it became known, was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [1] in the year 2000. Quite simply the name, 5/99, refers to the number of a JISC circular letter. It was the fifth circular issued by the JISC in 1999. So the name is pretty meaningless to those outside the JISC or not involved in one of 54 projects that were funded via the circular. The majority of the projects have now completed, the programme end date was July 2003.

Improving the Quality of Metadata in Eprint Archives

editor — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Marieke Guy, Andy Powell and Michael Day address the argument that the quality of service to end-users is markedly influenced by the quality of metadata being produced and provide suggestions.

Throughout the eprints community there is an increasing awareness of the need for improvement in the quality of metadata and in associated quality assurance mechanisms. Some [1] feel that recent discussion of the cultural and institutional barriers to self-archiving, which have so far limited the proliferation of eprint archives in the UK, have meant that anything that is perceived as a barrier between academics and their parent institutions needs to be played down.

Building OAI-PMH Harvesters With Net::OAI::Harvester

editor — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Ed Summers describes Net::OAI::Harvester, the Perl package for easily interacting with OAI-PMH repositories as a metadata harvester. Ed provides examples of how to use Net::OAI::Harvester to write short programs which execute each of the 6 OAI-PMH verbs.

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 Portole Project: Supporting E-learning

editor — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

Tracey Stanley, Mina Sotiriou and Matthew Dovey provide an overview of a project to produce tools to discover information resources and deploy them within a university VLE.