This is the UK Web Focus blog, written by Brian Kelly, UKOLN. UKOLN is a national centre of expertise in digital information management, based at the University of Bath. UKOLN is funded by the JISC.
Reflections on eLib and Other National Digital Library Programmes
Posted by Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) on 10 May 2009
I have been invited to give a talk at the CILIPS Annual Conference 2009 on “Inspiring Excellence: Yourself, Your Service, Our Future” which will take place in Peebles on 1-3rd June 2009.
I have been invited to give a talk in a session on “How Far Have We Come?” and the draft title of my talk is “From eLib to NOF-digi and Beyond“. In the talk I’ll give my thoughts on a number of national digital library development programmes which I have had some invovement with: namely eLib, DNER (which was subsequently renamed the JISC Information Environment) and the NOF-digitise programme.
Rather than looking at the outputs of such programmes I’ll be exploring the technical guidelines which funded projects were expected to follow. This will include a review of the standards documents developed to support these programmes and some of the important architectural decisions which had an influence across a range of projects. I’ll also explore the things I feel we got write – and also the things we missed or were late in adopting. The intention is to try to inform large-scale initiatives in the future by learning from our successes and failures.
I’ll write a number of blog posts in which I’ll describe my thoughts prior to writing the presentation. And I’d welcome comments from people who may have been involved in these programmes or have views and opinions they would like to share.
Chris Rusbridge said
If you find anything labelled eLib standards guidelines, or similar, I think it would be misleading to characterise it as part of “the technical guidelines which funded projects were expected to follow”. The actual document was, ahem, an uneasy compromise, I think, honoured most often in the breach, and not emerging until we were well under way. eLib was conceived pretty much “pre-web”, and we had to do a significant amount of retrofitting to adapt some projects to the emerging (and rapidly maturing) web context.