UKOLN News

Liz Lyon recently gave a presentation at the JISC Digital Repositories Conference in Manchester in a session on the curation of research data. Her presentation entitled “Dealing with Data: Roles, Rights, Responsibilities & Relationships” is now available.

Brian Kelly will facilitate a session on “Design Issues: Technological Challenges Posed by Web 2.0″ at the Fellows Conference 2007 organised by the Centre for Distance Education. The conference will be held at the Institute of Education, University of London, on Tuesday 19 June 2007.

Liz Lyon recently gave a presentation to the 4th Conference on Research Infrastructures 2007 in Hamburg. Slides from her presentation entitled “Dealing with Data: Roles, Rights, Responsibilities & Relationships in the European Context” are now available.

The Open Archives Initiative – Object Reuse and Exchange Project has just released a white paper entitled “Compound Information Objects: The OAI-ORE Perspective” which describes the Web-centric OAI-ORE perspective on compound information objects. This document is a work in progress and was used as a discussion document in preparation for the May 2007 meeting of the OAI-ORE Technical Committee. The paper presents some crucial thinking which underpins this project and outlines a range of issues that are critical to its success.

Two vacancies have arisen at UKOLN – one as Research Officer in the JISC Repositories Research Team (RRT) and one as Research Officer within the Digital Curation Centre & Repositories Support Project (to cover maternity leave). The closing date for applications is 29 June 2007.

The DCC invites the submission of full papers, posters and demonstrations for the second day of the 3rd International Digital Curation Conference.

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”.