UKOLN News

Issue 16 of the UKOLN Newsletter is now available online. The newsletter provides news, opinion and information on the wide range of activities undertaken by UKOLN, written by its staff.

A paper on “Implementing A Holistic Approach To E-Learning Accessibility” by Brian Kelly, together with Lawrie Phipps of the JISC TechDis service and Caro Howell, University of Bristol was awarded a prize for the Best Research Paper at the prestigious ALT-C conference held at the University of Manchester on 6-8th September 2005.

Registration for PV 2005 entitled “Ensuring long-term preservation and adding value to scientific and technical data” is now open. This conference is the third of a series on long-term preservation and adding value to scientific data, begun in 2002 in France. Over the past several years the importance of this topic has been recognised increasingly widely and the term “digital curation” has come into use which covers similar ideas. The conference will be held at The Royal Society, Edinburgh, from 21-23 November 2005.

Registration for the conference is now open. The Conference will be of interest to individuals, organisations and institutions across all disciplines and domains that are engaged in the creation, use and management of digital data from researchers and curators through to policy makers and funders.

The University of Bath is hosting an information day on the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) on the 9th September from 12:00 to 16:00. This event will consist of an introduction to the aims and objectives of the DCC and an opportunity to discuss the challenges of preserving digital assets through time with representatives of the centre.

On Tuesday, September 13, a special session at DC-2005 will, over a three-hour period, deal with the practical applications of Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) in the context of metadata, under the title: “Enhancing the Understanding of Meaning”. Pilot implementations and case studies, together with investigations of issues and requirements regarding vocabulary repositories and term/concept identifiers, provide the background for discussions – and there will be a question and answer session involving the audience and many experts in the field. Important contributions will come from UKOLN: Rachel Heery and Andy Powell are among the presenters and Traugott Koch is chairing the event.

The Summer issue of Ariadne was published on 30 July and includes articles by Ann Chapman, who describes Revealweb, a Web site that brings together information about accessible resources for visually impaired people, and Kevin Carey, who looks at accessibility to digital information systems across broadcasting, telecommunications and the Internet by disabled people and makes recommendations. Indeed this issue examines the topic of accessibility from a variety of perspectives. In addition, Paul Gerhardt, Co-Director of the Creative Archive at the BBC describes the origins and development of the Project while there are articles on Virtual Research Environments, mobile blogs for personal reflection, and supporting local data users in the UK academic community. Marieke Guy has collated reports from colleagues at JISC and UKOLN on sessions from the JISC Annual Conference held in Birmingham.

UKOLN currently has a vacancy for a Digital Curation Centre Research Officer. The closing date for applications is 26 August 2005.

The current issue of D-Lib Magazine marks its tenth anniversary, a significant milestone for any publication. During its life, D-Lib has become a mainstay of the digital library community. As one of the six D-Lib mirror sites, UKOLN would like to pass on our congratulations to all the magazine staff and authors who have made it such a success.

A preliminary programme for the DC-2005 conference, to be held in Madrid from 12 to 15 September, is now online. The programme includes keynotes by Thomas Baker, Ricardo Baeza, Johannes Keizer and Eric Miller, presentations of 36 papers and project reports, a series of tutorials on metadata basics and numerous working group meetings.