UKOLN News

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.

Brian Kelly will give a talk entitled “Library 2.0 and Web 2.0″ at a CILIP seminar on Transformational Technologies: Practical uses for Web 2.0 in the library environment which will be held in Glasgow on 2 November 2007.

Emma Tonkin of UKOLN will be speaking at this conference organised by the
Estonian Ministry of Culture in Tallinn on 18 October. Her presentation, entitled “Vocabulary evolution and management for the digital cultural
heritage sector” will examine current work in the metadata schema registry
sector and its relation to parallel work in vocabulary management as well as informal approaches to vocabulary development and use, such as tagging. She will go on to consider the relationship between different forms of semantic annotation and seek to provide a perspective on the overall metadata vocabulary landscape.

Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, gave a presentation entitled “Curating the Scientific Record: The Challenges Ahead” at the recent Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Data Management Workshop near Leamington Spa. Slides from this presentation are now available.

Emma Tonkin of UKOLN gave a presentation entitled “Kinds of Tags: a collaborative research study on tag usage and structure” during the 6th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop at ECDL 2007. The presentation, which she co-authored with Ana Alice Baptista, Seth van Hooland, Andrea Resmini, Eva Mendez and Liddy Neville, is now available together with other presentations from the Workshop.

Brian Kelly of UKOLN and Kara Jones of University of Bath Library will give a talk on “The Blogging Librarian: Avoiding Institutional Inertia” in the session on “Blogging Inertia and 2.0 Scepticism” at the Internet Librarian International 2007 Conference to be held at the Copthorne Tara Hotel, London on 8-9 October 2007.

Manjula Patel of UKOLN/DCC and Simon Coles of the University of Southampton
have made available a document entitled “A Study of Curation and Preservation
issues in the eCrystals Data Repository and proposed federation” as part of
work undertaken by the DCC in Phase 3 of the eBank UK Project. The study explores: audit and certification; OAIS and representation information; eBank AP and preservation metadata; and the ePrints.org respository software. It also makes recommendations in each of these areas in relation to the development of the eCrystals repository
and proposed federation.

Bookings are now open for this workshop which will be held at Austin Court, Birmingham on 26 November 2007. The event will provide an opportunity to hear examples which illustrate the diversity of approaches which are being taken in the provision of blogs and the exploitation of social networking services, and how students are addressing the challenges of making use of services such as Facebook. The event will provide an opportunity for discussing how institutions should go about providing such services in order to support institutional objectives, whilst minimising associated risks.

Brian Kelly of UKOLN and Kara Jones of University of Bath Library will run a
masterclass entitled “Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Organisation” at the Internet Librarian International 2007 Conference which will be held at the Copthorne Tara Hotel, London, on 8-9 October 2007.