1. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk UKOLN: WWW Brian Kelly UKOLN University of Bath Bath, BA2 7AY Email B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk URL http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ UKOLN is supported by: What We Are What We Do Where We’re Based

2. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 2 An Acronym Factory?! XML HTML CSS RDF XSLT SMIL SVG JISC Re:source EU IST FP6 ARCO BIBLINK Cedars CORES HILT UoB IMESH Reveal NSF FP5 TFL Funders / Stakeholders Some of the key technologies Projects Is this your view of UKOLN? DC MODELS

3. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 3 Contents About UKOLN  What we are  What we do Selected UKOLN Activities  Research Activities: Dublin Core and OAI * Metadata  Facilitating Events: MODELS  OAI Forum  …  Dissemination: Publishing E-Journals  Metadata tools  National services and service support *OAI stands for Open Archives Initiative. Please remind me if I use any unknown TLAs (or XTLAs)!

4. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 4 About UKOLN UKOLN: A national centre of excellence in digital information management Based in the University of Bath About 28 FTEs Funded by:  JISC  Resource  EU and other project funding streams

5. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 5 What Do We Do? UKOLN is involved in a range of activities at a local, national and international level UKOLN Research Development Dissemination EU-funded SCHEMAS project to develop framework for machine-readable registries Development of DCdot and RSSxpress metadata tools Ariadne and Cultivate Interactive e-journals Events OA-Forum workshops to progress deployment of OAI

6. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 6 Who Are We? The Research & Development Team carry out research in a range of aspects of digital information management The Information & Communications Team manages UKOLN’s Web sites, publish e-journals, provide marketing support, organise events, etc. The Distributed Systems Support Team manages UKOLN’s computing infrastructure and provide technical support The Admin Team provides administrative support for UKOLN The Policy and Advice Team provides outreach services to our communities R&D I&CT DSS PAT Admin 4

7. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 7 Examples Of Our Activities We will now briefly review a number of our activities: Metadata activities, including involvement in development of metadata standards and deployment of metadata Dissemination of our activities Use of metadata in our dissemination Support for national services

8. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 8 Metadata Metadata: Data about data “This metadata - it’s just catalogue records … isn’t it?” Resource discovery metadata: Information about Internet resources which helps users to find the resource “Catalogue Records for the Web” So what’s so special about metadata? The size of the Web & the range of resources (text, images, sound, video, virtual resources, …) The distributed, uncontrolled nature of the Web The nature of the Web R&D Team

9. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 9 Dublin Core Background: Cross-sectoral meetings (libraries, museums, galleries, etc) held to agree on approaches to resource discovery for Internet resources Agreed core set of 15 elements, known as Dublin Core (after Dublin, Ohio) Elements include Creator, Title, Publisher, Date, Rights, … R&D Team

10. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 10 MODELS MODELS: MOving to Distributed Environments for Library Services A UKOLN project funded by JISC’s eLib programme Provided a forum for the UK library and information communities to explore shared concerns, address design and implementation issues, initiate concerted actions, and work towards a shared view of preferred systems and architectural solutions See

11. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 11 From Warwick Framework … One of the MODELS workshops: Addressed the need for “a container architecture for aggregating metadata objects for interchange” Workshop (held at Warwick Univ.) led to development of the Warwick Framework See … to RDF Separately the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was developing a framework for metadata W3C developed RDF (Resource Description Framework) RDF was influenced by Dublin Core and the Warwick Framework

12. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 12 Brokerage UKOLN provides brokerage and facilitation services In the area of metadata: UKOLN involved from start in contributing to discussions, facilitating events, etc. Was involved in organising the MODELS workshops, one of which led to the development of the Warwick Framework, which contributed to the development of an metadata framework known as RDF Continuing involvement in Dublin Core workshops I&C Team The brokerage role typically involves organising events such as workshops in which experts contribute to the development of solutions in a particular area

13. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 13 Dissemination A wonderful solution to a problem is of no use unless the community knows about it! UKOLN’s dissemination activities include: Organising conferences, workshops and seminars Giving presentations at conferences, workshops and seminars Writing articles, papers, etc. Providing Web-based resources P&A Team

14. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 14 Ariadne The Ariadne Web magazine provides coverage of developments, especially within the UK HE sector Ariadne is published 4 times per year http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/

15. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 15 Cultivate Interactive Cultivate Interactive is funded by the EU’s DIGICULT programme Cultivate Interactive provides information on digital cultural heritage projects. It also provides a test bed for UKOLN’s research interests.

16. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 16 DC In E-Journals Cultivate Interactive makes use of Dublin Core metadata to provide enhanced searching I&CT Team http://www.cultivate-int.org/cat-search/

17. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 17 Managing Metadata Cultivate Interactive (and Exploit Interactive): Exploit Dublin Core metadata for enhanced searching locally Addresses the management of the metadata Document how it has addressed management:  Reuses the metadata for disclosing information about articles  Through use of OAI metadata  Through another XML format for uploading to the CULTIVATE Document Server

18. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 18 OAI OAI: Open Archives Initiative An open standard for sharing metadata UKOLN is: A member of the EU-funded Open Archives Forum, which is helping with the deployment of OAI Making use of OAI in the metadata for Cultivate Interactive articles Liaising with the University of Bath Library regarding use of OAI in a local e-prints archive

19. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 19 Tools To support the take-up of metadata, UKOLN has developed a number of tools which are freely available DSS Team DCassist is a Web-based tool which provides information about Dublin Core elements DCassist is available at

20. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 20 DC-dot is available at Tools (2) DC-dot is a Web-based metadata authoring tool

21. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 21 Resource Discovery Network Subjects gateways (e.g. SOSIG and BIOME) provide access to quality controlled resources The RDN provides a coordinated approach to work of the gateways (cross- searching, increased coverage, …) DSS Team

22. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 22 DNER  Information Environment UKOLN has developed a technical architecture and advised on standards for JISC’s DNER which aims to provide seamless access to a wide range of quality scholarly resources, based on use of open standards. See

23. A centre of expertise in digital information managementwww.ukoln.ac.uk 23 Finding Out More To find out more about UKOLN and our activities: Visit our Web site at Read our Web magazines at and Send an email request to info@ukoln.ac.uk if you would like to be added to the mailing list for our Newsletter Any questions?