News and Events

philip hunter

News and Events

Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.

The 7th Institutional Web Management Workshop :

Supporting Our Users

[April 2003]

The 7th Institutional Web Management Workshop will take place at the University of Kent on 11-13th June 2003. The theme of this year's workshop, the seventh in the series, is Supporting Our Users. The Institutional Web Management Workshop series is organised by UKOLN's UK Web Focus and its aim is to support members of institutional Web management teams within the UK Higher and Further Educational communities. Online booking for the workshop is now open.

Further information at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2003/ .

HILT Phase II

[March 2003]

Dennis Nicholson reports on the second phase of the High Level Thesaurus Project. HILT Phase II is researching, implementing and evaluating a pilot terminologies server for the JISC Information Environment, looking at a number of approaches to dealing with the problems of harmonising subject access across JISC services that use different subject or classification schemes. The pilot will include the DDC, UNESCO, and LCSH schemes at minimum, and will also look at common UK variations on subject terms from at least one subject scheme. The schemes will be mapped to each other using a common spine. Primary aims are to:

Provide a practical experimental focus within which to investigate and establish subject terminology service requirements for the JISC Information Environment, with particular reference to collection level requirements in JISC collections and services
Make recommendations as regards a possible future service, taking into account a range of factors, including a cost-benefit analysis.

In addition to JISC who fund the project and are active participants, and the Centre for Digital Library Research at Strathclyde University, who are the lead site, the project has active participation from UKOLN, OCLC, mda (formerly Museum Documentation Association), National Council on Archives, The British Library, National Grid for Learning (NGfL) Scotland, Resource Discovery Network Centre (RDNC), Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC), Scottish University for Industry (SUfI), The Cura Consortium, Willpower Information and Wordmap.

Further information at http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ (HILT) and at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/ (JISC Information Environment). Organisations or individuals can participate more directly in the project by joining the HILT stakeholders list.

Realising the Potential of eLearning

[April 2003]

A workshop organised by the EPSRC, DfES, ESRC and the eScience Programme

Educational technology has the potential to transform how people of all ages learn and develop skills. The UK has been a world leader in research into distance learning (through the Open University), intelligent tutoring systems, mobile learning, and learning communities, but currently suffers from a lack of investment and coordination, particularly in comparison with the United States.

This workshop aims to bring together leading academics, educational practitioners, policy makers and funding bodies with a view to developing a clear set of proposals for a focused UK research initiative to realise the potential of ICTs to benefit learning.

If you would like to attend this workshop, please contact Dolly Parkinson (Dolly.Parkinson@epsrc.ac.uk) by 5pm on 1 May 2003 at the very latest. Please note that spaces for the workshop are limited and will be allocated on a first-come first-served basis.

TEL Final Conference

The TEL project is pleased to announce The European Library (TEL) Final Conference at the National Library of Lithuania in Vilnius on 24 September 2003, 2 - 6 p.m.

[April 2003]

The European Library, TEL, is a pioneering collaboration between a number of European national libraries. Created under the auspices of CENL, the Conference of European national librarians, it will establish a professionally designed and maintained single access point to selected parts of their holdings spanning a range of collections in all the partner national libraries so that the informed citizen in any country can utilise the resources not only of his or her own national library but also, during the same search session, the resources of any other partner national libraries which may hold material relevant to his or her interest. This discovery and access tool will be multilingual and it will support the various character sets in use in CENL libraries.

Initially, the feasibility of this venture is being tested, with part-funding from the European Commission, in a project in which the participants are CENL, the national libraries of Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom along with ICCU, the national central cataloguing institute from Italy. In time it is anticipated that more and more of the CENL member libraries will join the enterprise as full partners. In order to achieve this goal the participants are working towards the establishment of mechanisms whereby a common portal will enable access to the collections of the united national libraries to any citizen via the Internet.

At the TEL Final Conference the project will present its results and give an outlook for further plans and developments. The participation in the conference is free of charge. Conference language is English. A registration form and more information about the programme can be found at the project website: http://www.europeanlibrary.org and follow the link to "Final Conference".

Athens wins JISC UK HE and FE contract

[March 2003]

JISC is pleased to announce that the contract to provide an Access Management service for UK Further and Higher Education has been awarded to EduServ. This means that institutions will continue to access electronic resources via the Athens system for a further three years, from 1 August 2003 - 31 July 2006.

Representatives from the JISC's Committee for Content Services (JCCS) undertook a thorough review of the technical requirements of the Access Management service during the procurement process to ensure that the chosen provider will supply a service that fully meets the needs of the education community.

JISC and EduServ will continue to work together over the next three years to develop the Athens service further for the benefit of the community.

Please see the EduServ announcement at http://www.athensams.net/news/jisc_contract2003.html for further information.

SEPIA descriptions of photograph collections draft

[April 2003]

Within the framework of the EU-funded Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access (SEPIA)-Project (http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/sepia/), the working group on descriptive models has been working on an advisory report to provide recommendations on how to describe a photographic collection. A draft version of this report is now available for comments at: http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/sepia/workinggroups/wp5/advisory30.pdf (PDF, 1619 KB)

The task of the working group has been to analyse existing methods to describe photographs and devise a basic model. The SEPIA model will be presented in an advisory report and applied in a software tool. The draft report contains an extensive overview of the multi-level structure and individual elements of the model, a recommended mapping to Qualified Dublin Core and a summary of core elements. The core elements are meant to be used as guidelines for institutions that wish to have a basic description model for their photo collection. The model as a whole provides a more detailed set of guidelines.