UKOLN’s support for the cultural heritage sector is funded by the MLA. Since the MLA’s remit is cultural heritage organisations in England the focus of our work with by institutions based in England. However the expertise we have and many of the resources we have developed are likely to be beneficial to a wider community.

The value which UKOLN can provide to a wider community has been identified by Museums Galleries Scotland (MGS). We are now providing a support service for MGS member organisations. The service will be informed by the various resources we have available, including our Introbyte briefing documents and this blog.  In addition an email service (mgs-support@lists.ukoln.ac.uk)  is available for use by the MGS member organisations.

As described on the MGS Web site the Digital Advice service for the MGS community is provided by UKOLN in conjunction with the Collections Management Network in order to support the  MGS Digital Content Action Framework.

Our intention is that key areas of interest to MGS member organisations will not only be dealt with by our email support service but will identify areas of wider interest which may be addressed by additional briefing documents or blog posts.

My name is Marieke Guy and I have been at UKOLN for almost 9 years now.

Marieke Guy

After getting an English Literature and Psychology degree I completed my Information Management MSc at Manchester Metropolitan University. My background means that I have always been interested in aspects of my work that relate to the museums, libraries and archives sectors.

I have been involved in a number of cultural heritage projects from early eLib days (Electronic Libraries Programme). Probably the most significant one for me was when I worked as a NOF-digitise Advisor and co-ordinated technical support and advice services for the New Opportunities Fund national digitisation programme. The programme was a landmark one for digitisation in the cultural heritage sector and is still referred to today.

I currently work as a research officer in the Community and Outreach Team at UKOLN. Much of my work involves exploring Web 2.0 technologies and their relevance to the communities we work with. I have also recently been involved in the JISC Preservation of Web Resources (PoWR) project providing advice on best practices for the preservation of Web resources. This has allowed me to write a number of intobytes on Web preservation for the Cultural Heritage Web site. At the moment I am working on a project looking at the use of APIs in academia, I hope to be able to transfer some of the lessons learnt to the cultural heritage sector. The reuse and sharing of data through APIs and newsfeeds is a fast moving and interesting area offering much potential for libraries, museums and archives. I recently attended Mashed Library event and was enthused by what people were experimenting with.

I’m looking forward to posting on the UKOLN Cultural Heritage Blog!

Thanks

Marieke

Ann Chapman

My name is Ann Chapman and I am part of the UKOLN Community and Outreach Team. As I joined UKOLN in 1987, my work areas and interests have developed and changed over the years.

As a qualified librarian, initially my work focused on the quality and availability of library catalogue records and the extent of and need for retrospective conversion of non-digital library catalogues. Later, working on the Revealweb project to develop an online digital catalogue of materials in accessible formats for visually impaired people inspired my interest in the whole area of accessibility. Other work as part of Collection Description Focus, describing physical and electronic resources at collection level, provided opportunities to work with musems and archives as well as libraries. I also contribute to the development of national and international standards, chairing the CILIP/BL Committee on RDA.

In addition to a continuing awareness role for Collection Description Focus, and work on cataloguing standards (MARC 21, RDA and Dublin Core Collections AP), I am also responsible for creating and maintaining the UKOLN Cultural Heritage web pages. This is providing me with the challenge of identifying which Web 2.0 technologies and tools can be used to deliver UKOLN content for the culture heritage sector – and learning how to use them. I recently attended an inspiring talk by Seb Chan about the potential uses of Web 2.0 in the cultural sector which gave me some useful ideas.

As a new blogger, I’m looking forward to contributing posts to the UKOLN Cultural Heritage Blog – and seeing your comments.

Ann

Brian Kelly

My name is Brian Kelly and my job title is UK Web Focus.  As you might gather from this title, my main area of interest is the Web – which, for the past few years, has related to Web 2.0 technologies (such as blogs, wikis, social networks, etc.) and approaches (e.g. a culture of openness).

I have been involved in Web development since January 1993, when I helped to established a Web service at the University of Leeds – probably the first institutional Web service in a UK university (at that time there were only 50 organisations around the world which had registered their Web site). I have been employed at UKOLN since November 1996 and my responsibilities include monitoring developments and innovations on the Web and promoting and embedding best practice.

Over the past few years much of the emphasis of the work has focussed on supporting the cultural heritage sector.  I have established and delivered a series of workshops which have provided advice for staff in museums, libraries and archives on ways in which the Social Web can be used to enhance the services they provide.  I am also one of the main authors of UKOLN’s IntroByte series of documents.

In December 2007 I was awarded the Information World Review’s prize for the Information Professional of the Year.  In addition my main UK Web Focus blog was awarded a prize by UCISA for its effectiveness in communicating with users.

I am team leader of UKOLN’s Communication and Outreach team and, together with a number of my colleagues, am looking forward to using this blog as a way of further extending our links with the cultural heritage sector.

Welcome to UKOLN’s Cultural Heritage blog. This blog has been set up to support UKOLN’s work for the cultural heritage sector by providing a forum for dissemination, discussion and debate related to innovation and the networked environment.

We will use the blog to inform our readers of developments in this area, speculate on the implications of a rapidly changing environment and encourage discussion on emerging best practices.

The blog is aimed primarily at practitioners and policy-makers in the UK’s cultural heritage sector. We will seek to publish a regular series of posts, with ideally at least one post per week.

We will also aim to publish a number of guest blog posts, in which members of the cultural heritage sector can provide views from their own perspective.