New and Noteworthy

Citation

(2001), "New and Noteworthy", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 18 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2001.23918hab.001

New and Noteworthy

Funds New UK Library Projects

The British Library's Cooperation and Partnership Programme has announced funding of a range of schemes which will benefit libraries, museums, archives and other groups across the UK. The fund has a total of £425,000 to distribute, which has also been contributed to by the Research Support Libraries Programme and Re:source, the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries. The calls for proposals were launched in October 2000 and ten projects were finally selected which were felt to particularly reflect the criteria of being British, learned, cooperative, practical and pertinent and which furthered the aims of cooperation and partnership among British libraries.

The successful schemes include projects to widen access to libraries in Merseyside, to increase the number of resources available to the blind, to increase public access to medical information and to provide a performing arts resource for the theatre museum. There are also successful proposals from the National Library of Wales, Derbyshire County Council and the London Libraries Development Agency as well as projects to map the UK music resource, to provide historical information on black and Asian Londoners and to promote resource sharing in the east of England. Each of these programmes will receive grants from £20,000 to £89,000.

British Library Cooperation and Partnership Programme Fund: Html ResAnchor http://www.bl.uk/concord, CPP_CALL@bl.uk

Association of Research Libraries

Expresses Concern about Merger of Journal Publishers

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), which represents more than 120 of the largest research libraries in North America, has expressed concerns about the consolidation of the journal publishing industry in general and the acquisition of Harcourt General by Reed Elsevier in particular. The merger is still under review in the UK but has been cleared by the US Department of Justice. ARL is concerned about possible pricing and information access implications of large-scale publishing mergers and seeks assurances that library materials will remain within the reach of the broadest possible community. ARL points out that other mergers of publishers of materials purchased by ARL have been followed by price rises of up to 27 per cent. The association has put its information resource "Issues in Scholarly Communication" which has been developed by the Office of Scholarly Communication, online at http://www.arl.org/scomm.

Publishers are keen to allay fears of the negative impact of consolidation on the academic, research and library community, and there are initiatives, for instance PubMed Central, online at http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov, in which publishers allow material to be made available for free online after a specified delay after publication.

ARL: 21 Dupont Circle, Washington, DC http://www.arl.org

Treloar College

Opens Learning Resource Centre for the Disabled

Treloar College in Hampshire, UK, a specialist college of further education for students with physical disabilities, has recently opened a new £1.8 million learning resource centre for disabled people, which includes a specially adapted library. Any one of the 7,500 books held in the library can be selected electronically by users and the books then move automatically along the shelves to the students. There is also additional help from new technology for visually impaired users which can adjust book-text viewing screens by size, style and colour. The project has received additional funding from many other organisations including the National Lotteries Charities Board and the Bridge House Estates Trust Fund and it is hoped that the new library will open up education, training and employment opportunities to many more disabled students. The college takes students from all over the UK and from overseas and this new facility will also be made available to disabled people from the local community.

Treloar College: Holybourne, Alton, Hampshire, http://www.treloar.org.uk

Cornwell Affiliates plc

Develops New Standard Specification for ERMS

Cornwell Affiliates, an IT management consultancy which provides services to the private and public sectors including the Public Records office and various government departments, has developed a standard specification for Electronic Records Management Systems (ERMS). The work, which was begun last year, was commissioned by the EC Interchange of Data Between Administrations programme (IDA), as a means of underpinning electronic commerce and government by maintaining electronic information for the long term to demonstrate accountability and preserve reliable access. In addition, many records of electronic transactions need to be kept in a way that retains their legal admissibility and evidential weight. There are potentially billions of electronic records in use in the EU, many of which have been generated in a way that means that they do not fall under any formal system of management or control. Effective electronic records management means that there needs to be a formalisation of the management of existing records and a system for archiving those that will be generated by new service delivery models. The specification that has been developed is called MoReq ­ Model Requirements for ERMS, which aims to reconcile traditional record-keeping methods and theories with practical usability. It has been designed to be customised and users are encouraged to modify requirements to suit their individual needs. The specification is available from the Cornwell Web site below and from the EC's Publications Office.

Cornwell Affiliates: http://www.cornwell.co.uk

OCLC FirstSearch

Available to New Turkish Library Consortium

Thirteen members of the Turkish University and Research Libraries Association (UNAK) have formed a new consortium to use the OCLC FirstSearch service. UNAK aims to investigate the problems of university and research libraries, documentation and information centres and related special libraries with reference to new technology and to provide assistance in its application. It also works to help information personnel and to make international comparisons of high tech problems and their solutions. The consortium was particularly interested in full-text capability and in access to OCLC's databases, so they selected the OCLC Base Package with full text option, which includes access to databases such as WorldCat, ERIC, MEDLINE and GPO and OCLC ArticleFirst, ContentsFirst, Union Lists of Periodicals and the FirstSearch Electronic Collections Online bibliographic index. This agreement gives UNAK libraries access to a large number of databases and the ability to link to full text provided online, which gives immediate desktop delivery. OCLC hope that this agreement will strengthen their links with Turkish libraries.

OCLC: http://www.oclc.org

UNAK: http://www.unak.org.tr (Turkish language site).

Talis Information Ltd

Launch UnityWeb

Talis Information Ltd, a supplier of software services and solutions to libraries in the UK and Ireland, which grew out of The Birmingham Libraries Co-operative Mechanisation Project, has worked in partnership with The Combined Regions, a consortium of most of the regional library cooperation organisations in the UK and Ireland, to produce UnityWeb. The aim of The Combined Regions is to support inter-library lending, cooperation and access, and it has achieved this by merging the catalogues of its members into a single database. UnityWeb covers the holdings of 450 libraries in the UK and Ireland, including the British Library, and as such demonstrates library cooperation and resource sharing in action and offers networked access to a new source of bibliographic and location information. The service has been developed with an inclusive approach and easy-to-use search capabilities, and can be made available directly to library users. The clear interface has been designed for easy use by those with impaired vision.

Particular benefits of UnityWeb include advantages in electronic requesting and in accessing and updating the database via the Web. It can be accessed with versions 4 and above of Internet Explorer or Netscape and 100 subscribing institutions have gone live with it to date.

Talis: http://www.talis.com

Combined Regions: http://www.thecombinedregions.com

UnityWeb: http://www.unityweb.org

ISI ResearchSoft and CHEST

Make Research Software Available to UK Institutions

ISI ResearchSoft has signed an agreement with CHEST, a not-for-profit organisation supported by the Department for Education and Employment that negotiates agreements for the supply of IT-related products to higher and further education institutions in the UK to make bibliographic software products available at favourable site licence terms to eligible establishments in the UK. The agreement covers EndNote which is reference management software that is particularly popular with authors and students working alone, Reference Manager, which offers features making sharing reference collections easier and ProCite which enables the creation of subject bibliographies and is aimed at professional information scientists. All these are configured to search for and extract citations from all the major online reference libraries including MEDLINE/PubMed, ISI Web of Science, BIOSIS, Current Contents and ERIC as well as a selection of university and public library databases. The site licence fee, which is for a minimum term of three years, will depend on the number of students and staff enrolled at participating institutions and any student or member of staff can install the software on their own computer for a small additional fee. UK distribution and support for all three packages will be provided by Adept Scientific plc.

Adept Scientific: http://www.adeptscience.co.uk

CHEST: http://www.chest.ac.uk

Internet2

Develops Higher Education Directory

Internet2, a consortium of 180 US universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies accelerating Internet development, is developing a directory of directories for higher education (DoDHE). It is a project which aims to provide a database of faculty in educational institutions worldwide and so provide a valuable new resource for the international academic community. The service for directory searching, or "Web of People", will place heavy demands on standardisation procedures due to the number of institutions that could ultimately be involved. It could develop into a key tool for collaboration as faculty members and researchers will be able to identify other academics interested in their field and to contact them immediately.

Sun Microsystems have provided hardware and software for the project and Georgetown University, Washington DC, which is housing the project is providing the network access and systems support.

Internet2: http://www.oclc.org

Los Alamos

Loses Physics Archive as Preprint Pioneer Heads East

The Los Alamos preprint server, which has established itself as physicists' favourite place for early circulation of their research, is leaving the New Mexico laboratory to set up shop at Cornell University in New York state.

Paul Ginsparg, who founded the server ­ now known as arXiv ­ ten years ago, is leaving the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to take up a faculty position at Cornell, and the server will move with him. Cornell plans to expand arXiv's reach into other disciplines, and to use it as a test bed for research into digital libraries.

Ginsparg says growing dissatisfaction with LANL is a major reason for his departure, citing a lack of enthusiasm for the archive among senior staff. Only his former group leader Geoffrey West and library director Rick Luce gave the archive strong support, he says. He adds that the nuclear-weapons laboratory has been shifting its support towards large groups at the expense of individual investigators, and is suffering from declining morale in the wake of recent security scandals.

William Press, deputy director of the laboratory, says: "We're sorry to see Paul go, but Cornell has created a very unique opportunity for him. We are very proud to have been the incubator of this revolution in scientific publishing." He adds that senior laboratory staff have strongly supported the archive activity, but admits that it was sometimes "a struggle to see where it would fit in" with the laboratory's other activities.

The archive currently receives around $300,000 in annual funding from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, which runs the lab, and LANL itself.

http://www.cornell.edu/

British Library

Adding the E-Ingredient: Appointment of New e-Director Signals the Commitment to Innovation

The British Library has appointed its first e-Director as part of a wider restructuring of its top tier of management. Dr Herbert Van de Sompel has been appointed Director of e-Strategy and Programmes, and will join the Library on 1 September 2001.

Charged with extending access to resources, both for customers and members of the public, the team will implement strategy across a broad range of activities of the UK's national library. The post of e-Director in particular will be central in taking forward the British Library's vision of a digital future for its collections and services.

Dr Van de Sompel joins the Library having spent the past year as Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. For 17 years he was head of the library automation department at the University of Ghent, Belgium where he led an ambitious programme to create an outstanding electronic library and planned and implemented a range of innovative services.

As e-Director he will lead the BL's transformation to an e-centric organisation, pulling together historically discrete and disparate programmes, acting as champion and advocate for e-strategy and leading an integrated Digital Library development programme. Major transformational developments to be supervised and driven forward by the e-Director include the digitisation of many of the Library's collections as well as the archiving of materials that are "born digital".

The International Coalition of AccessEngineers and Specialists (ICAES)

Receives Award

ICAES has named the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) one of the winners of their 2001 Collaboration and Coordination Award. The Collaboration and Coordination Award recognizes national, international or industry efforts to prevent, resolve, or address compatibility and interoperability.

The Daisy Consortium, National Information Standards Organization and Open e-Book (OEB) Forum were honored for their work in developing file specifications for Digital Talking Books and e-Books. In recognizing this work, ICAES said: "New generation digital talking books based on the open standards being developed by the Daisy Consortium and NISO provide significant advances in usability and functionality for persons with print impairments. The Open eBook specification, a base format for mainstream electronic books, incorporates features to promote accessibility. Members of the Daisy and NISO efforts are working hand in hand with members of the Open eBook Forum to build a future where the world of electronic books will be open to all."

http://www.icaes.org