UKOLN News

Brian Kelly is to take part in a seminar on “From Bits to Blogs – Taking the IT Revolution into Museums, Libraries and Archives” at an event organised by MLA-North East at the University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, on 18 October 2006.

At the recent CILIPS/SLAINTE conference on electronic information and libraries,held in Dundee, Maureen Pennock ran a session entitled “From Digital Creation to Digital Curation” which explored some of the challenges in managing digital cultural heritage resources in regional and local libraries to ensure preservation and accessibility. Maureen”s presentation is now available.

Ann Chapman and Rosemary Russell recently carried out a review of Shared Infrastructure Services for the JISC; the report of this review is now available in .pdf format on the JISC Web site as “JISC SIS report final 2006″. It is one of the supporting documents for the recently issued JISC Call for Projects (Circular 04/06: JISC Capital Programme) for the period March 2007 to March 2009.

UKOLN”s workshop on “Exploiting the Potential of Wikis”, to be held at Austin Court, Birmingham on 3 November 2006, is now fully subscribed.

Ann Chapman spoke in her capacity as chair of the CILIP/BL Committee on Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules at the 2006 CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group (CIG) Conference, held recently at the University of East Anglia. Her presentation, entitled “Moving from AACR2 to RDA”, is now available.

The Eprints Dublin Core Application Profile co-ordinators ran a sucessful
special session at the Dublin Core 2006 conference in Manzanillo, Mexico on 4 October. The session, presented by Julie Allinson from UKOLN and Andy Powell from the Eduserv Foundation, presented the profile to the group and asked for comments, reactions and suggestions from the assembled metadata experts. Reactions were almost overwhelmingly positive, particularly in relation to the use of FRBR and the Dublin Core Abstract Model. It was also agreed that the application profile activity be taken forward by a new Dublin Core taskforce in the autumn. This will help the work reach a global audience and facilitate validation by the wider community. Material from the workshop will soon become available from the conference Web site and further information can be obtained from the Eprints Application Profile wiki.

Marieke Guy, Interoperability Focus Officer, UKOLN, will give a presentation entitled “Wiki or Won’t He?” during the ILI session (A103) on Wikis and Social Software, 16 October. Marieke will consider the highs and lows of establishing a public sector wiki; she will also examine the notion that setting one up might be a “cheap and cheerful” way to get people talking and achieving consensus.

Julie Allinson of UKOLN will be running a tutorial with Andy Powell from the Eduserv Foundation at the forthcoming Open Scholarship 2006 conference. The tutorial will offer an introduction to the Eprints Application Profile which makes use of the Dublin Core Abstract Model and FRBR to group together descriptions of different expressions of a work. The tutorial will be of use to anybody with an interest in metadata, particularly the metadata used to describe scholarly works in institutional, and other, repositories.

Maureen Pennock has been invited to chair the conference of the same name organised by Interactive Business Events in Manchester on 12 October 2006. The conference will examine how public sector bodies may effectively address the email challenge they face by introducing policies to manage emails as records in accordance with growing legal and regulatory requirements. The programme will include case studies, a workshop session, round table and panel discussions and speakers from a wide range of organisations.

UKOLN and JISC have just published a comprehensive review of terminology services and technology, written by Douglas Tudhope, Traugott Koch and Rachel Heery. The JISC Capital Programme call (September 2006) points to it as briefing information and selects various recommendations as invited topics for projects, i.e. in the repositories section: a semantic interoperability demonstrator combining established vocabularies and social tagging, text mining tools, name authority and terminology registry services. Other parts of the publication describe different types of vocabularies and place terminology services in user and information life cycle contexts. They also cover vocabulary mapping and automatic classification/indexing, systematically investigate potential Terminology Web Services and investigate needed identifiers, protocols and standards.