UKOLN News

Migration to the new-look UKOLN Web site, begun on 5 November, has been successfully completed and the site is now stable. Further improvements and updates to the site are planned for 2008 and significant milestones will be reported in our newsfeed.

Liz Lyon recently gave the opening keynote address at the MLA North East
Regional IT Conference “Bits to Blogs 2007″, held at the University of
Teesside. Liz” presentation, entitled “From Audience to Avatar?
Transformational Technologies for the Cultural Sector”, is now available.

Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, will give the opening keynote address at the MLA North East one-day conference to be held at the Centre for Enterprise, University of Teesside, on Thursday 22 November. The MLA-NE Regional IT Conference is entitled “Bits to Blogs 2007″ and Liz” presentation is called “From Audience to Avatar? Transformational Technologies for the Cultural Sector”.

Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, recently gave a Keynote presentation to the Directors” Meeting of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. This year”s meeting focused on the theme of Preservation and
Discovery in the Digital Age. Liz” Keynote presentation, entitled “Open Science and the Research Library: Roles, Challenges and Opportunities?” is now available.

Brian Kelly and Paul Walk will facilitate a workshop session on “Responding to Change and Institutional Challenges” at the CETIS 2007 conference in Birmingham over 20-21 November 2007.

Although the UKOLN workshop “Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks” is now fully subscribed, we intend to make the workshop materials available on the Web. As a taster for what the workshop will cover, an 8-minute video clip about the workshop has been produced.

Issue no.53 of Ariadne was published recently with a trio of articles on European-based projects: Martin Feijen,
Wolfram Horstmann, Paolo Manghi, Mary Robinson and Rosemary Russell present an outline of the DRIVER Project and its
achievements so far in supporting and enhancing digital repository development in Europe; Johan Ooman and Vassilis
Tzouvaras provide an insight into the background and development of the Video Active Portal which offers access to television heritage material from leading archives across Europe; and
Leo Waaijers reflects on four years of progress in the DARE Programme while also taking a look at its future. Meanwhile Sophia Ananiadou looks at the main scientific challenges being handled by the National Centre for Text Mining together with issues related to deployment, use and uptake of NaCTeM”s
text mining tools and services. John Kirriemuir introduces a series of studies investigating how the Second Life environment is being used in UK Higher and Further Education while Sue Manuel and Charles Oppenheim discuss the concept of Google as a repository
within the wider context of resource management and provision in Further and Higher Education. Chris Hilton and Dave Thompson update us on plans for the engagement with born digital archival material at the Wellcome Library and provide a range of strategies to support
their aims. Following John MacColl”s review last issue, Lorcan Dempsey
reviews Volume III of a landmark collection on the history of
libraries in Britain and Ireland.

The UKOLN web site has been undergoing a transformation and its new format will be going live during the week beginning
5 November. There may be some disruptions to services during this migration phase; however, we will do our best to keep these to a minimum. The work is scheduled to be completed during
November.