Welcome to UKOLN

Farewell to Ann Chapman, UKOLN Research Officer, 1987-2011

Upon her retirement at the end of March 2011, Ann Chapman's colleagues at UKOLN thanked her for many years of dedication, commitment, and excellent standards. Ann Chapman has been an integral part of UKOLN since its inception. Her career progression has closely reflected the development of UKOLN from a centre for cataloguing research to the centre of excellence in digital information management that it is today. 

UKOLN Director Liz Lyon observed: "Working with Ann has always been a pleasure! She commands huge community respect and rightly so.  We have been truly privileged to have Ann working at UKOLN for all these years and to benefit from her insight and expertise".

Ann first joined the University of Bath in 1970, as a Senior Library Assistant.  After a short break following the birth of her children, during which she undertook a number of contracts for specific work (which included cataloguing the Pitman and Bath & West Show special collections and writing her thesis for the Fellowship of the Library Association), Ann carried out a short piece of research on catalogue records for Philip Bryant, then Director of the Centre for Catalogue Research (CCR) – later the Centre for Bibliographic Management then UKOLN).  Ann's research during this period led, in 1987, to a permanent position within what is now UKOLN.

During her time at UKOLN Ann has been involved in a wide variety of activities, including organising events and managing funding.  Ann's research activities, however, have made the greatest contribution to UKOLN and to the wider HE and library communities.   Here is a selection:

• BNB Currency Survey monitored the availability and quality of records created for the British National Bibliography.
• The Full Disclosure series of projects examined the need for retrospective cataloguing / conversion of manual catalogue records to machine-readable form in the UK.
• Collection Description Focus aimed to improve co-ordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions, domains and sectors.
• Re-development Cornucopia (the online database of UK museums, galleries, archives and libraries collections, developed by the MLA) involved working on mappings of metadata schema, reviewing the content of the entries for museums, and considering how library entries could be contributed via the contributor interface.
• The Tap into Bath project created a demonstrator searchable database of collection-level descriptions of collections located in the City of Bath.

Ann also developed a number of studies for the JISC. Notably she produced an overview specification for shared infrastructure and a landscape study on the UK HE sector use of content, communication, and social networking services developed outside the sector by global enterprise.

Latterly Ann has been working with the MLA to support the cultural heritage sector and has organised and delivered a nation-wide series of workshops on applications of the social web for this sector.  Another lasting legacy is the Cultural Heritage Web Site and blog, which Ann developed and where recently she published her final blog post. and through which UKOLN will continue to provide access to the topic pages, to the successful series of briefing papers IntroBytes.

The quality of Ann's work has been recognised by awards from important organisations in our sector:

• In 2000 Ann received the CILIP Catalogue and Indexing Group's Allan Jeffreys Award 'for significant contribution to the understanding and development of statistical evidence within professional fields of interest'.
• In 2006 Ann received a Certificate of Acknowledgement from the JSC for Revision of AACR, citing her valued 'contribution to the GMD / SMD Working Group'.

Membership of committees

• Elected Honorary Secretary to the Cataloguing and Indexing Group of CILIP in April 2007
• Member of Bibliographic Standards Group of the Book Industry Communication (BIC) since 1995
• Chair of the CILIP/BL Committee on AACR2/RDA since June 2006

Professional awards and recognition

• MA from the University of Central England, 1999.
• Recipient of the 2000 CILIP Catalogue and Indexing Group’s Alan Jeffreys Award ‘for significant contribution to the understanding and development of statistical evidence within professional fields of interest.’
• A Certificate of Acknowledgement from the JSC for Revision of AACR for her ‘contribution to the GMD/SMD Working Group’, awarded in 2006.

Volume 6, Issue 1 of The International Journal of Digital Curation Now Available

UKOLN has recently published Volume 6, Issue 1 (2011) of The International Journal of Digital Curation on behalf of the Digital Curation Centre. In his editorial, Chief Editor and Director of the DCC Kevin Ashley remarks on the way the 21 contributions to the Journal reflect the maturation process that has occurred across the lifetime of the DCC. While we still read of individual and interesting projects in this field, it is noticeable how much more integrated the activity in digital curation has become.

Kevin steers readers towards one very discernible trend in the way that papers recently published deal with the whole issue of increased scale and the approaches being adopted to address the difficulties that masses of data create. They include, for example, processes of automation and methods of making large volumes of information comprehensible to humans to enable them to make informed decisions about preservation. Consequently there are papers which deal with both visualisation and the use of emulation techniques. In the latter instance there is material on how tools operating inside emulators are proving to be of increasing use as an aid to migration, an interesting development where two approaches that were once seen by some as opposing if not mutually exclusive are now arguably working far closer together. Meanwhile another aspect driven by the whole explosion in data volumes is addressed by work from Denmark on cost models for digital material in cultural heritage activity.

Issue 1, Volume 6 also offers insights in the area of data reuse with work on project members’ attitudes to the use of primary data and data reuse and the way in which opinions in respect of research data may alter even when the data themselves do not. Other material looks into the role of data centres over the years while other work examines the researcher motivations for open science and open data and the benefits they can provide. The Editor expresses his enthusiasm for work spent on collating the exact nature of those benefits, in particular those relating to the citation of data.

Kevin also provides us with pointers towards material in the Issue which deal with institutional and professional change. They describe the way in which the profession and institutions are handling the changes wrought by the changing nature of data creation and collection and how various bodies are coping with the relentless drive towards digital material.

Inevitably in such a wide collection of contributions it is impossible to provide an encompassing theme for all material despite the overwhelming success of the Editor’s analysis of Volume 6, Issue 1. This should not deter readers from investigating those contributions since they offer most interesting insights which have clearly enthused the Editorial Board and which Kevin hopes will provoke as much comment as those contributions marked as representing a more discernible theme. Like him, we invite readers to send all and any comments on the Issue’s material to ijdc@ukoln.ac.uk and so enliven the debate that is necessary so that "we refine and test the ideas we are collectively exploring in digital curation."

UKOLN and the Cultural Heritage Sector

UKOLN has a long history of engagement with the cultural heritage sector. It dates back to its launch in 1977 when the British Library became the original and sole funder of UKOLN (funding from JISC started in 1992). In UKOLN's early days our work focussed on library bibliographic data - in particular monitoring the accuracy and availability of catalogue records created by the British Library, and the development of Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs).

From 1977 to 1996 UKOLN reported to the British Library Research and Development Department (BLRDD) and then, following changes at the British Library, to the British Library Research and Innovation Centre (BLRIC) from 1996 to 1999.

Those official links with the British Library changed in 1999, when the Library and Information Commission (LIC) became UKOLN's co-funder. Following changes in Government departments and in Government policies, the LIC and the Museums and Galleries Commission (MGC) were merged in 2000 to form Re:source, which was then renamed the MLA in 2004. The MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Council) was established to coordinate policies across the cultural heritage sector, including libraries, museums and archives.

UKOLN's core funding from the MLA officially finished on 31 March 2011. We have been pleased to have such a long-standing involvement with the cultural heritage sector over the past 34 years. But despite the announcement of the abolition of the MLA our engagement with the sector will continue including our involvement with the Strategic Content Alliance, the LOCAH Project, the W3C Library and Linked Data Incubator Group and our shared research interests with the British Library.

A review of UKOLN's involvement with the cultural heritage sector has been published on UKOLN's Cultural Heritage blog.

UKOLN Blogs

Some members of staff at UKOLN make use of blogs to support their dissemination and user engagement activities, either as part of UKOLN's core activities or to support project work.