UKOLN News

UKOLN has a vacancy for an Events and Marketing Manager to cover maternity leave. The closing date for applications is 15 November 2006.

Ariadne issue 49 was published on 30 October 2006 and contains an interesting viewpoint from Naomi Korn and Charles Oppenheim on Creative Commons Licences together with a pair of articles from Japan and the Netherlands on strategies for encouraging participation in institutional repositories. In addition there are articles on developments in e-book technologies and the future of textbooks, and the GROW learning object repository together with comment on Google”s latest developments. In addition, Ann Chapman has written on RDA, the new standard, Marieke Guy looks into wikis in the public sector, and Greg Tourte and Emma Tonkin report on videostreaming of events.

The JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme Meeting took place in London recently for the next set of projects approved for funding between April 2006 and March 2009 focusing on repositories and preservation. Several members of UKOLN were there to give presentations and to facilitate discussions with projects on: OAIS Reference Model, Eprints (Scholarly Papers) Application Profile, IEMSR and IESR, e-Frameworks, Intute Repositories Search Project and Preservation.

Monica Duke of UKOLN will be delivering a tutorial for beginners on open access and the OAI-PMH at the 15th Hellenic Academic Libraries Conference at the University of Patras, Greece, on 1 November 2006. This tutorial was originally developed in the FP5 Open Archives Forum Project, which UKOLN co-ordinated.

eBank, R4L, and Spectra recently held a joint consultation workshop at the London Metropole Hotel. The aim of the workshop was to discuss digital repositories supporting eResearch in the context of exploring the eCrystals federation model. Presentations from the workshop are now available.

The co-ordinators of the Dublin Core Application Profile for ePrints (Scholarly Works) recently ran a tutorial at the Open Scholarship 2006 Conference in Glasgow. The tutorial, presented by Julie Allinson from UKOLN and Andy Powell from the Eduserv Foundation, presented the profile to the group and opened the floor for comments, reactions and suggestions. There was much interest in the work, particularly from European projects looking into similar metadata issues. Concern over the complexity of the model was discussed, with the authors of the profile arguing for necessary complexity to facilitate a much richer metadata set for use by aggregators. Slides from the tutorial are available on the Eprints Application Profile wiki.

Rosemary Russell of UKOLN has recently completed the Report of the UK DCMI Affiliate 2005-2006. The UK Affiliate is funded by JISC and MLA, with UKOLN acting as managing agent to plan and co-ordinate UK DCMI Affiliate activity.

The second International Digital Curation Conference will take place over 21-22 November 2006 at the City Centre Hilton in Glasgow. The theme of the conference will be Digital Data Curation in Practice. The programme comprises a series of peer-reviewed papers covering a range of disciplines from social sciences and neurosciences to astronomy. The programme will also focus on a number of different aspects of the curation life cycle including the management of repositories, educating the data scientist and the role of policy and strategy. There will be a panel session on Open Science.

Version 64 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography has just become available. The SEPB, which presents selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet, is marking its tenth anniversary since it was first published in October 1996. Our congratulations to Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

Maureen Pennock took part recently in a workshop on Archiving the Web in London. Her presentation entitled “Archival Perspectives on “Web Archiving”" is now available.