UKOLN News

UKOLN is working with Collections Trust, Culture 24 and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to provide resources and information to the museum, library and archive sector in the digital context. This new area of the UKOLN Web site provides access to a variety of resources on a range of issues of particular relevance to the cultural heritage sector, and brings together information previously distributed across the UKOLN Web site.

Brian Kelly has co-authored two papers presented at the Accessible Design in the Digital World (ADDW08) Conference held in York recently. The paper “Reflections on the Development of a Holistic Approach to Web Accessibility”
described Brian”s activities over 10 years in working with David Sloan and other members of the accessibility community in the development of a holistic approach to Web accessibility. In the paper entitled “Web Accessibility 3.0: Learning from the Past, Planning for the Future” Brian
and Liddy Nevile suggested that there was a need to think afresh about the
problems of social inclusion and argued that “Accessibility 3.0″ must be
very different from the WAI WCAG 1.0 and holistic accessibility approaches
if it is ever to be effective. The presentation of this paper at ADDW08 was
videoed and is available.

Registration is now open for the 4th International Digital Curation Conference on 1-3 December 2008 in Edinburgh. This year the focus will be on radical sharing, new ways of doing
science (large-scale research networks, mass collaboration, dynamic publishing tools, wikis, blogs, social networks,
visualisations and immersive environments); sustainability of curation; and legal issues, including privacy, confidentiality and consent, intellectual property rights and provenance.

The Digital Curation Centre has recently announced the launch of the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) and the Data Audit Framework (DAF), to be held at the British Academy in London on 1 October 2008. Both DAF and DRAMBORA form part of the development of auditing tools co-funded by JISC and the European Union to help institutions manage their assets and maximise their potential for long-term reuse. In
collaboration with DigitalPreservationEurope this day-long
event is designed to introduce delegates to these auditing
methodologies and tools. It will also provide information on the
kind of support in their use that institutions can obtain from
the Digital Curation Centre.

Workshop 3 of the JISC-sponsored project Preservation of Web Resources (JISC-PoWR), to be held at CEEBL, University of
Manchester on 12 September, is now fully booked.

Brian Kelly was recently interviewed by the US-based Collegewebeditor.com, an independent, popular, and influential blog about the Web, marketing, and PR in Higher Education. In his answers, Brian describes his involvement in the Web since its very early days and explains why his work at UKOLN is so stimulating. He also reflects on some of the challenges institutions face in exploiting Web 2.0 and mentions two HEIs which are overcoming the barriers and providing effective user-focused services based on Web 2.0 approaches.

The Digital Curation Centre and DigitalPreservationEurope have recently announced the release of the Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment (DRAMBORA) toolkit which is now freely available in a new updated interactive online version.

Ann Chapman looks at why the new cataloguing code Resource
Description and Access (RDA) is needed in this article which has just been
published in the September issue of the CILIPjournal “Update”.