UKOLN

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Formerly known as The United Kingdom Office for Library and Information Networking, UKOLN was a centre of expertise in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information, education and cultural heritage communities. UKOLN was based at the University of Bath and was funded through a mixture of core and project grants. Latterly it received its core funding solely from JISC, but had received core grants previously from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and the British Library. [1]

Contents

History

UKOLN traces its roots back to 1977, when Maurice Line initiated the Bath University Programme of Catalogue Research with funding from the British Library. This led to the establishment, in 1979, of a research centre under the directorship of Philip Bryant, again with British Library funding. It was known initially as the Centre for Catalogue Research, and later renamed the Centre for Bibliographic Management (CBM) to reflect its broadening research portfolio. [2]

In 1989, the British Library established the UK Office for Library Networking to work alongside the CBM. It had one full-time member of staff. In 1992, it merged with the CBM and started to receive additional core funding from JISC. The combined organisation was known briefly as UKOLN: The Office for Library and Information Networking, but three years later this was simplified to the UK Office for Library and Information Networking. [3] In 2002 it became known simply as UKOLN, again reflecting a shift in the focus of its activity.

In 1994, Lorcan Dempsey succeeded Philip Bryant as Director of UKOLN. He in turn was succeeded in the role by Liz Lyon in 2000.

In May 2013 an article published in the Times Higher Education announced that "16 of its 24 University of Bath-based staff [were made] redundant after the cessation of a £622,000 annual grant from the higher education technology body Jisc". [4]

Although UKOLN continued after 31 July 2013 it was significantly reduced in size and was no longer working in many of the areas which were responsible for its visibility in national and international arenas. [5] UKOLN's Director departed without replacement in late 2013. [6] The remaining staff were made redundant or redeployed in July 2015, marking the cessation of UKOLN's activities. [7]

Work

UKOLN's main work included:

Its specialist areas included metadata, interoperability and digital curation. It was involved in a range of national and international projects including the DELOS Network of Excellence in Digital Libraries, [8] the Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education (DESIRE), [9] the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER, a precursor to OpenAIRE), [10] the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, [11] the Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) Grand Challenge Project, [12] and the development of the SWORD interoperability standard and the Bath Profile of the Z39.50 standard. It was a founder member of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in 2004.

UKOLN published the Ariadne (Web magazine), targeted principally at information science professionals in academia, archives, libraries and museums, and the International Journal of Digital Curation. [13] UKOLN also organised many events, including the annual Institutional Web Management Workshop and the International Digital Curation Conference. [14]

Related Research Articles

Dublin Core Standardized set of metadata elements

The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, is a set of fifteen "core" elements (properties) for describing resources. This fifteen-element Dublin Core has been formally standardized as ISO 15836, ANSI/NISO Z39.85, and IETF RFC 5013. The core properties are part of a larger set of DCMI Metadata Terms. "Dublin Core" is also used as an adjective for Dublin Core metadata, a style of metadata that draws on multiple RDF vocabularies, packaged and constrained in Dublin Core application profiles.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI-PMH must support representing metadata in Dublin Core, but may also support additional representations.

In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies, and it combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and "born-digital" content, regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time. The Association for Library Collections and Technical Services Preservation and Reformatting Section of the American Library Association, defined digital preservation as combination of "policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content over time." According to the Harrod's Librarian Glossary, digital preservation is the method of keeping digital material alive so that they remain usable as technological advances render original hardware and software specification obsolete.

An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution.

Jisc

Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit company whose role is to support institutions of higher education and research, including post-16 education. It provides network and IT services, digital resources, relevant advice, and procurement consulting, while researching and developing new information technologies and modes of working. Jisc is funded by a combination of the UK further and higher education funding bodies, and individual higher education institutions.

Agricultural Information Management Standards, abbreviated to AIMS is a space for accessing and discussing agricultural information management standards, tools and methodologies connecting information workers worldwide to build a global community of practice. Information management standards, tools and good practices can be found on AIMS:

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) was established to help solve the extensive challenges of digital preservation and digital curation and to lead research, development, advice, and support services for higher education institutions in the United Kingdom.

A current research information system (CRIS) is a database or other information system to store, manage and exchange contextual metadata for the research activity funded by a research funder or conducted at a research-performing organisation.

The Digital Preservation Award is an international award sponsored by the Digital Preservation Coalition. The award 'recognises the many new initiatives being undertaken in the challenging field of digital preservation'. It was inaugurated in 2004. It was initially presented as part of the Institute of ConservationConservation Awards. Since 2012 the prize is presented independently. The prize includes a trophy and a cheque. Awards ceremonies have taken place at the British Library, the British Museum and the Wellcome Trust.

The Repository Support Project (RSP) was a 7-year Jisc funded project set up to support and develop the UK network of institutional repositories. It was originally funded through to March 2009, but was then extended to run until early 2011. The project ceased on 31 July 2013.

Preservation metadata is information that supports and documents acts of preservation on digital materials. A specific type of metadata, preservation metadata works to maintain a digital object’s viability while also ensuring continued access through providing contextual information as well as details on usage and rights. It describes both the context of an item as well as its structure.

Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. Enterprises are starting to use digital curation to improve the quality of information and data within their operational and strategic processes. Successful digital curation will mitigate digital obsolescence, keeping the information accessible to users indefinitely. Digital curation includes digital asset management, data curation, digital preservation, and electronic records management.

A schema crosswalk is a table that shows equivalent elements in more than one database schema. It maps the elements in one schema to the equivalent elements in another schema.

Digital Library Federation

The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a program of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) that brings together a consortium of college and university libraries, public libraries, museums, and related institutions with the stated mission of "advanc[ing] research, learning, social justice, and the public good through digital library technologies." It was formed in 1995.

The Faculty Of Science is one of the four faculties which make up the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland. The faculty contains a number of departments offering various undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

SWORD is an interoperability standard that allows digital repositories to accept the deposit of content from multiple sources in different formats via a standardized protocol. In the same way that the HTTP protocol allows any web browser to talk to any web server, so SWORD allows clients to talk to repository servers. SWORD is a profile (specialism) of the Atom Publishing Protocol, but restricts itself solely to the scope of depositing resources into scholarly systems.

Dryad (repository)

Dryad is an international open-access repository of research data, especially data underlying scientific and medical publications. Dryad is a curated general-purpose repository that makes data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. The scientific, educational, and charitable mission of Dryad is to provide the infrastructure for and promote the re-use of scholarly research data.

OER Commons

OER Commons is a freely accessible online library that allows teachers and others to search and discover open educational resources (OER) and other freely available instructional materials.

COnnecting REpositories

CORE is a service provided by the Knowledge Media Institute, based at The Open University, United Kingdom. The goal of the project is to aggregate all open access content distributed across different systems, such as repositories and open access journals, enrich this content using text mining and data mining, and provide free access to it through a set of services. The CORE project also aims to promote open access to scholarly outputs. CORE works closely with digital libraries and institutional repositories.

The National Documentation Centre is a public organisation that promotes knowledge, research, innovation and digital transformation. It was established in 1980 with funding from the United Nations Development Programme with the aim to strengthen the collection and distribution of research-related material, and to ensure full accessibility to it. It has been designated as a National Scientific Infrastructure, a National Authority of the Hellenic Statistical System, and National Contact Point for European Research and Innovation Programmes. Since August 2019, it has been established as a discrete public-interest legal entity under private law, and is supervised by the Ministry of Digital Governance. The management bodies of EKT are the Administrative Board and the Director who, since 2013, has been Dr. Evi Sachini.

References

  1. ↑ "History". UKOLN Informatics. Archived from the original on 2018-03-09.
  2. ↑ "Former UKOLN Director Honoured by University". UKOLN Website. Archived from the original on 2018-07-01.
  3. ↑ "UKOLN Annual Report 1995-6". Archived from the original on 2013-07-19.
  4. ↑ Parr, Chris (2013-05-09). "Ukoln hit by job losses as Jisc removes funding". Times Higher Education.
  5. ↑ "UKOLN Diaspora history". Archived from the original on 2013-12-05.
  6. ↑ "Farewell to Liz Lyon". UKOLN Informatics. Archived from the original on 2018-03-11.
  7. ↑ "Welcome to UKOLN". UKOLN Website. Archived from the original on 2018-06-30.
  8. ↑ "Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries". CORDIS Website. Retrieved 2019-02-25.
  9. ↑ "DESIRE phase II: Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education". UKOLN Website. Archived from the original on 2018-07-01.
  10. ↑ "DRIVER - Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research". SHERPA Website. Retrieved 2019-02-25.
  11. ↑ "UK DCMI Affiliate". UKOLN Website. Archived from the original on 2018-07-01.
  12. ↑ "Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) Grand Challenge Project". Archived from the original on 2015-09-22.
  13. ↑ "International Journal of Digital Curation" . Retrieved 2019-02-25.
  14. ↑ "International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC)". DCC Website. Retrieved 2019-02-25.
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