UKOLN News

Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, has organised a panel session on the topic of “E-Infrastructure and long-term preservation”, one of a set of parallel workshops on specific aspects of scientific publishing on offer at a conference over 15-16 February 2007 in Brussels. The conference, Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area, hosted by the European Commission, offers a programme under the theme “Access, Dissemination and Preservation in the Digital Age”.

Brian Kelly will give a talk entitled “Web 2.0: What Does It Mean for
the Research Community?” on 7 February 2007 at a PPARC First Wednesday Forum
in Swindon. He will describe how various Web 2.0 technologies are being exploited
within the Higher Education sector and beyond.

Issue 18 of the Web version of Focus on UKOLN, the UKOLN Newsletter, containing news, opinion and information on the wide range of activities undertaken by UKOLN is now available.

A report by Dr. Wendy A. Warr entitled Digital Repositories Supporting eResearch: Exploring the eCrystals Federation Model is now available. Dr.Warr”s report covers the eBank/R4L/SPECTRa Joint Consultation Workshop which was held at the London Metropole Hotel on 20 October 2006.

Ariadne Issue no.50 was published on 30 January 2007. It includes (among others) an article by Melanie Bates, Sue Manuel and Charles Oppenheim on models of early adoption of ICT Innovations in Higher Education, a contribution from Jon E. Lervik, Mark Easterby-Smith, Kathryn Fahy and Carole Elliott on the challenges of integrating information across boundaries between knowledge communities, an article by Philip Beresford giving the story from the British Library”s perspective of the development of new software to support all stages of harvesting Web sites for preservation and Alexander Ball and Manjula Patel provide an overview of the second annual conference of the Digital Curation Centre, while Marieke Guy and Paul Walk contribute on interesting wiki and JISC CETIS events.

Gráinne Conole, Professor of e-Learning at the Open University, has recently completed an external evaluation of the JISC-funded eBank Project. Funding for Phase 3 of the Project was recently awarded from the JISC Capital Programme. Professor Conole”s findings are now available.

This is a call for speakers and workshop facilitators for this year”s Institutional Web Management Workshop. IWMW 2007 will be held at the University of York from Monday 16 – Wednesday 18 July 2007. The workshop is for all people involved in the management of institutional Web services.

Michael Day of UKOLN has contributed a chapter to a new book on Web archiving published by Springer. Edited by Julien Masanès of the European Archive, “Web Archiving” looks at, among others, the issues of selection, collection methods, access, use and long-term preservation. Michael investigates the long-term preservation of Web content, focusing on the need for trusted repository infrastructures and the adoption of appropriate preservation strategies with supporting metadata.

UKOLN currently has vacancies for two posts to support deployment of digital repositories and shared infrastructure services within the UK higher education community. The closing date for both applications is 26 January 2007.

Emma Tonkin, Interoperability Focus Officer at UKOLN, will be giving a poster presentation on the topic of “A discount approach to the Semantic Web” at the Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives (SWAP) Conference in Pisa.