Table of contents: issue41

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.

The Tapir: Adding E-Theses Functionality to DSpace

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

Richard Jones demonstrates how the Theses Alive Plugin for Institutional Repositories (Tapir) has provided E-Theses functionality for DSpace.

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].

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.