UKOLN News

The JISC Repositories Support Project (RSP) is delighted to announce the launch of the UK’s first summer school for prospective and new managers of institutional and subject repositories. This unique three-day residential course will deliver a comprehensive overview of the practical challenges and solutions to effective repository implementation. Applications for places on the course are now being taken.

Brian Kelly will be a co-facilitator and speaker at a workshop organised jointly by the Society of Archivists and UKOLN entitled “Sharing Made Simple: a practical approach to social software” which will be held at the South Camden City Learning Centre, London on 5 June 2007. Brian will give an introduction to Web 2.0, describing some of the key technologies (such as blogs, wikis and RSS) and the culture associated with Web 2.0. The talk will give an assessment of some of the risks associated with Web 2.0 and the difficulties which may be experienced in trying to deploy such technologies.

UKOLN has a vacancy for a Web Systems Developer. The closing date for applications is 6 June 2007.

Issue 51 of Ariadne published recently contains, among others, an article by Geoff Butters, Amanda Hulme and Peter Brophy on the COINE Project, an approach to enabling a wide range of users to create and share their own stories on the Web, an article by Henry S.Thompson who introduces the W3C Technical Architecture Group and its work, while Andrew Treloar and David Groenewegen, in the first of a two-hander, describe three inter-related projects to support scholarly outputs and the e-research life cycle. Kevin Emamy and Richard Cameron describe Citeulike, a tool which assists researchers gather, collect and share papers. There are also articles on Developing a Virtual Research Environment in a Portal Framework, Using Blogs for Formative Assessment and Interactive Teaching, as well as the Search Engine Ask and on OpenID, decentralised single sign-on for the Web. Eddie Young and Matt Thrower of UKOLN share their trials of a form of server management while Steve Hitchcock”s article on project video production is an encouragement and a caution. Jessie Hey and Chris Awre together with Julie Allinson and Mahendra Mahey of UKOLN report on the Open Repositories 2007 conference. Pete Cliff of UKOLN obliges with a review of “Digital Literacies for Learning”.

Emma Tonkin of UKOLN will be speaking on the topic of real-world metadata schema
registries
at XTech 2007 in Paris on Thursday 17 May 2007. The theme of the conference, to be held
over
15-18 May, will be “The Ubiquitous Web”.

Brian Kelly will give a talk entitled “Building (and Sustaining) Impact for your Web Resource” at an ARLIS study day on 23 May 2007. The theme of the day is “DIP”ping your toe in the water: Digital Image Projects, where to begin and how not to end” and will be held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Russell Square, London.

Book now for the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group (CIG) seminar in London on 8 June 2007. Focusing on sharing ideas for incorporating blogging into your working life, and suitable for experienced bloggers and non-bloggers alike, this event is aimed at practitioners engaged in traditional “backroom” activities such as cataloguing, indexing, acquisitions, and knowledge management.

Brian Kelly will present a paper entitled “Accessibility 2.0: People, Policy and Processes” at the W4A 2007 conference in Banff, Canada on 8 May 2007. This paper was co-authored with David Sloan, Stephen Brown, Jane Seale,Helen Petrie, Patrick Lauke and Simon Ball.