News and Events
Slide Libraries and The Digital Future
Wednesday 24th March, Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2EU. For more information and for booking details contact laura.valentine@royalacademy.org.uk. Booking closes on 3 March 2004.
AUDIENCE: UK Slide Librarians in HE and those responsible for visual collections
"Higher education in the UK has always needed images, especially in the field of art and design, and institutions have built up their own slide libraries to service that demand. Latterly, however, it is digital images that are being sought by lecturers and students and numerous products are being produced to accommodate this need. Slide librarians need to educate themselves about these new products and update their skills so that they can continue to ensure that their specialist knowledge of image use at higher education level is applied by the new developers".
Jenny Godfrey (2004)
[January 2004]
The proposed OpenURL Framework Standard goes to ballot
Eric Van de Velde reports that NISO Committee AX has delivered the proposed OpenURL Framework Standard to NISO headquarters.
The documents can be found on the Web site of NISO Committee AX at: http://library.caltech.edu/openurl/Standard.htm
NISO will hold a ballot among its membership according to its established procedures. For more details, please consult the NISO Web site at http://www.niso.org/, where the official announcement will be posted in the next few days.
The NISO membership will be submitting comments along with their votes. Until the end of the ballot -- March 10th, 2004, -- comments remain welcome at openurl.comment@library.caltech.edu .
[January 2004]
OpenURL Router released
The the availability of the OpenURL Router has been announced. For more information see http://openurl.ac.uk/doc
The OpenURL Router is sponsored by the JISC and administered by EDINA in association with UKOLN. The Router is provided to all HE and FE institutions in the UK, with the aim of:
- Helping institutions with OpenURL Resolvers to establish OpenURL links from a wider range of services.
- Enabling providers of OpenURL aware services to link to the appropriate OpenURL Resolver for each of their end users.
- Extending the range of services in which OpenURL links can usefully be deployed.
The OpenURL Router works by offering a central registry of institutions' OpenURL resolvers. An institution registers details of its resolver just once, at openurl.ac.uk. When the resolver has been registered at openurl.ac.uk, any service provider can provide users from that institution with OpenURL links to their resolver.
Any queries on the above to be mailed to EDINA support at helpdesk@openurl.ac.uk
[January 2004]
The 10th INFORUM Conference on Professional Information Resources
2004, May 25 - 27, 2004, Prague (Czech Republic) http://www.inforum.cz/ , http://www.inforum.cz/english
The three-day conference, which is focused on variety of aspects concerning use of electronic information resources in research, development, education and business, will be attended by information specialists from public and special libraries, the corporate sector and government agencies. The conference is the main event in this field in the Czech and Slovak Republics and last year the conference also extended its focus to countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Last year there were 70 professionals who contributed papers to a conference of over 630 participants.
Conference Topics
- Trends & News in the Field of Electronic Information Resources
- Website Optimisation for Search Engines
- Creating a Successful Information Service and Its Contribution to the Organisation
- E-books: Threat or Supplement to Traditional Documents?
- Marketing the Information Resources and Services
- Presentation of Cultural Heritage : Integration - Aggregation - Contextualisation
- Document Delivery Services (DDS) - Present and Future
- Information Services Effectiveness in Health Care
- Library and Public Administration Partnership
Abstracts should be sent via the conference Web site using the relevant form http://www.inforum.cz/inforum2004/english/papers.php
Deadlines
- 16 February 2004: Submission of abstracts
- 8 March 2004: Acceptance notifications
- 12 April 2004: Submission of full text's electronic versions
The delegates' registration forms will be available along with the preliminary conference programme by the beginning of March 2004.
[January 2004]
Call for Papers: ECDL 2004
European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) 2004
September 12-17 2004
University of Bath, UK
http://www.ecdl2004.org
ECDL 2004 is the 8th in the series of European Digital Library Conferences. ECDL has become the major European Forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, organisational and social issues.
Digital library research brings together a number of disciplines and practitioner communities, providing an environment for debate and an opportunity for establishing collaboration. ECDL provides a forum for the exchange of ideas between scientific disciplines and fosters joint initiatives with application communities. Involvement of researchers and practitioners from computing and information science disciplines is well established at ECDL. Increasingly these disciplines are engaging in discussion and co-operation with other groups concerned with knowledge management. ECDL 2004 encourages involvement from a wide range of disciplines and looks forward to increasing contributions from usability experts, educationalists, developers of eLearning systems, and by working within the eScience and GRID communities. The continued success of ECDL rests on the exchange of ideas and experience between these groups.
ECDL 2004 welcomes contributions and participation from scholars, researchers, practitioners and policy makers across the range of disciplines related to the development of the digital library in its widest sense.
IMPORTANT DATES
5 April 2004: Papers, panels, tutorials and workshops submissions due.
19 May 2004: Poster and demonstration submissions due.
11 June 2004: Final submission date.
[January 2004]
ePrints UK Workshops
ePrints UK Workshops In the next few months ePrints UK Project will be running a series of workshops providing an introduction to eprints and institutional repositories and the issues surrounding them. These workshop are aimed at HE/FE librarians, information systems staff and academics and are free to attend. People can now register for the Edinburgh (Friday 14 May) and Nottingham (Monday 24 May 2004) workshops.
[January 2004]
PRONOM file format database available
The National Archives is committed to preserving historic electronic records indefinitely, and has embarked on a programme to make this feasible on a practical level. One strand in this programme is PRONOM, our database of software products and file formats. For example you can enter a file extension and PRONOM will find all products that can read or write files with that extension.
The Web version PRONOM 3 is now available to the whole preservation community. For the initial data load the emphasis is on the most commonly used office products for PC operating systems from PC-DOS onwards. We intend to load information on about 450 products over the next few months and we encourage software developers and others to be proactive in providing information via our online submission form. For the place of PRONOM in a digital preservation programme, see the article PRONOM: A Practical Online Compendium of File Formats http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews7-5.html
Jeffrey Darlington
Digital Preservation Department
The National Archives
[January 2004]
JSTOR announces new Arts & Sciences Collections
JISC and JSTOR are very pleased to introduce two new collections: the Arts & Sciences IV Collection and the Arts & Sciences Complement. Together with Arts & Sciences I, II, and III, these collections will represent the building blocks of a single interdisciplinary archive of over 600 journals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
The Arts & Sciences IV Collection will focus on disciplines new to JSTOR including law, psychology, and public policy and administration. The collection will also include a selection of new education journals and will incorporate 20 of the journals already available in the Business Collection. Arts & Sciences IV will not contain the 26 other Business Collection journals that are available through Arts & Sciences I and II. When complete, the collection will comprise a minimum of 100 journals to be released between 2004 and 2006.
For further information on these new collections, including pricing information, please see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/jstor.html .
[January 2004]
Announcement of Web Service Resource Framework
Dr Daniel Sabbah, Vice President, Software Development, Strategy and Architecture at IBM, on behalf of IBM and the Globus Alliance, announced proposals for a collection of web service standards that provide conventions for handling stateful resources, e.g., file systems, databases and long-running programs, within the preferred service-oriented architecture of web services. This neatly addresses the requirements of large-scale and long-running systems typical of grid computing while retaining the style of web services favoured by industry.
The announcement was made at Globus World ( http://www.globusworld.org/ ) in San Francisco. More information can be found at http://www.globus.org/wsrf/
Professor Tony Hey, Director of the UK e-Science Core Programme said,
"The proposed WSRF standards are a very welcome step as they bring the web services and grid communities into closer alignment. This will lead to increased synergy with commercial middleware development that will be of significant value to research communities. In this emerging framework the UK is expected to continue to play a leading role in developing standards and their implementations."
Prof Malcolm Atkinson Director of the National e-Science Centre said,
"These proposed standards are a very valuable and a much needed step in the integration of web service and grid approaches to large scale distributed systems. I'm delighted to see that they provide an effective framework for handling stateful components which are essential for grids, computational steering and distributed data management. Many European organisations rely on the Globus Toolkit and we are pleased to be at the vanguard of developments which will deliver much greater synergy between commerce and research."
[January 2004]
UKOLN Public Library Web Managers workshop 2004: Beyond the Web site
UKOLN will be holding another of its popular public library web managers workshops in May this year. The event will take place on the 5th and 6th May at the University of Bath conference centre.
The event is aimed at all public library staff with responsibility for developing web-based services in public libraries. This year the focus will be on developing and implementing quality web-based content and services to maximise the potential of the People's Network ICT infrastructure.
The event will be practice-based with case studies from library and information managers, plus the chance to debate the the pros and cons of some of the more innovative e-services e.g. mobile technologies and wireless access in public libraries.
For the preliminary programme (January 2004) we have the following speakers:
- Martin Greenwood, Socitm Insight Programme Manager (Socitm - the Societyof I.T. Management in local government which publishes the 'Better Connected' report on local authority website
- David Potts, Senior Network Adviser, at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council - on the viability of Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi 'hotspots' in public libraries.
- Derrick Fernandes, ICT Development Manager at the London Borough of Hillingdon, on the 24/7 networked electronic information services in Borough libraries.
- Andrew Lewis, e-Services Officer, Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead on Webwords - the 'listen before you choose' way to select audio books.
- Nigel Peck, Managing Director MIS Web Design Limited, on Content Management Systems and the issues to consider when choosing a CMS.
Plus Brian Kelly, Web Focus at UKOLN on Implementing Quality Assurance For Your Web Site, and Ann Chapman, Bibliographic Management at UKOLN on demystifying metadata.
For further information please contact events@ukoln.ac.uk
[January 2004]
UKOLUG Web Development Day
Usability Testing, and Blogs and Wikis
Date: 12 February 2004
Venue: CILIP, London
Seminar leader: Martin White
The day will comprise two half-day seminars, and delegates may attend either or both of the seminars.
Further information:
http://www.ukolug.org.uk/content/public/activities/meetings/index.html
[January 2004]