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In this article, Teresa Hackett reports on the final concertation meeting
of the European Commission Telematics for Libraries Programme (1990-1998), as libraries
become an integrated part of the IST Programme under the Fifth Framework Programme.
«Consolidating the European Library Space»,
organised by DG Information Society/D-2 Cultural Heritage Applications
(formerly the Libraries Unit), was a major and final concertation
meeting of the Telematics for Libraries [1] Programme
1990-1998. The meeting attracted over 120 participants and speakers from all
over Europe and fifteen Fourth Framework Programme (FP4) projects took the
opportunity to demonstrate their project results. The aim was to mark the
transition from the Telematics for Libraries programme as libraries become an
integrated part of the Information Society Technologies [2]
(IST) Programme under the Fifth Framework Programme (1998-2002). The meeting reviewed
the achievements so far of the Telematics for Libraries programme, evaluated
results and looked at new alliances and key issues facing the European
information society in the new millennium and aimed to create a platform for
future co-operation and development.
There were keynote speeches on the main aspects of the Programme, new media literacy in the Information Society, the converging worlds of libraries, archives and museums, new synergies between national and European library policies, opportunities for co-operation with Central & Eastern Europe and the future role of the cultural heritage sector in the IST Programme. There was also discussion of key issues : copyright & licensing, e-commerce and cultural heritage institutions, new ways of delivering education services, interoperability & standards and digital preservation. A workshop dealt with the exploitation of FP4 project results and there was a practical session on how best to promote a project Website, including using metadata.
The conference proceedings will be available on the Telematics for Libraries concertation meeting Web site [3].
The location for the conference was Mondorf-les-Bains [4] in Luxembourg. Mondorf-les-Bains is a small thermal resort about 20 km south of Luxembourg city near the Moselle region [5] and next to the border with France and Germany. Some people visited the thermal baths, others took a trip to France. The conference was held at Casino 2000 [6] which, as well as being a conference centre, is an established casino and some of the participants could be seen trying their luck at the roulette table! The conference dinner was enjoyed by around eighty and the relaxed and friendly atmosphere contributed to the "human networking" aspect of the meeting.
The meeting was aimed at FP3 and FP4 libraries projects, National Focal Points, policy makers and key players in Europe. All 15 EU countries were represented, as well as EEA/EFTA countries, Norway and Switzerland. Partners from 30% of FP3 projects and 68% of FP4 projects were at the meeting, with almost half of these from on-going FP4 projects (in December 1999, 29 FP4 projects and Accompanying Measures will still be running). This demonstrates a strong sense of community and cohesion in the Programme, as well as an active interest in continuity.
 Figure 1: Graph Showing Participants by Country (EU) |
 Figure 2: Graph Showing Participants by Project |
A short follow-up email questionnaire was sent to everyone who attended. Participants found the agenda interesting and informative, enjoyed the venue and location and particularly appreciated the interaction with colleagues from all over Europe. The main problem participants had was choosing between parallel sessions!
 Figure 3: Responses to Question "Overall, were you satisfied with the conference?" |
 Figure 4: Responses to Question "Were you happy with the content of the conference?" |
 Figure 5: Responses to Question "Do you think that your attendance at the conference will be of use to your future work?" |
The Fourth Framework Programme contained a new and specific action line for international co-operation, within which the countries of Central and Eastern Europe were a priority objective. Under the Fifth Framework Programme, candidate countries are able to participate, with Community funding, in the projects of the programme under basically the same conditions as organisations from the Member States [7]. So a welcome aspect of the meeting was that it attracted participants from CEE countries. This is largely due to the efforts of the Accompanying Measure EXPLOIT [8] (although not all CEE participants were on EXPLOIT grants). One of the objectives of EXPLOIT is to provide opportunities for key personnel from CEE countries to acquaint themselves with the results of Libraries sector projects and related activities. This specifically includes facilitating their participation in major EC events.
Travel grants to the IST Conference in Helsinki [9] and the Telematics for Libraries meeting were advertised on relevant discussion lists e.g. DIGLIB, PACS-L, Jesse, ELAG, IOIS, Knihovna, (Slovak), AIBIBL, INFOBIB (Polish) and at recent regional conferences and seminars e.g.
One application for the IST Conference and eight applications for the Telematics for Libraries meeting were received. Seven applications for the Telematics for Libraries meeting were accepted, although two of the chosen applicants were unable to attend as they couldn't obtain travel visas on time.
The meeting proved useful in identifying issues and speakers for a planned conference about European-led projects and concrete discussions took place with EU institutions about common areas of interest and future co-operation. A suggestion for future events was to include a partner-finding session for CEE partners, who would describe their areas of interest and competencies.
Examples of how information on the meeting will be disseminated:
 Figure 6: Graph Showing Numbers of CEE Participants |
CEE Associated States not represented were Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slowenia.
"Although I have read a lot of about libraries, consortia and information technology, meeting people during the conference, listening their presentations and discussing different aspects of their projects allowed me to see the issues from a different point of view, to broaden my knowledge about trends and activities in the field of IT." - CEE participant
"I think the conference at Mondorf was an outstanding event. It was one of the best professional events in which I have ever participated. It provided very useful and practical information not only about developments that have taken place in Europe as a result of the different programmes, but concerning the current situation and planned developments as well. It was quite intriguing to see the "new philosophy" behind the current and planned programmes and gain more understanding about possibilities, procedures and plans. I wish that more of my colleagues could participate although I hope that many of them will read the text of the presentations when they will be available hopefully some of them in Hungarian, too. I also hope that it will be possible to join in some projects in the near future. Realising that the main focus of the conference was not the situation of libraries in CEE countries and their potential for European co-operation, I was satisfied with the programme. However it might be useful to devote more efforts in the future to discuss this aspect." - CEE participant
"After consolidation of my library, I expect that next year, after a new law on libraries is passed, it will be possible to join some suitable project(s) which will now be easier to identify. Sometimes it seems to me that western Europe libraries are far ahead of our libraries especially in applied technology and their financial status. It is difficult to undertake research when the library has to fight for day-to-day survival. We still must solve "basic" problems and tasks that have already been solved in western libraries for some time. It is difficult to foresee that a library could be a contributing partner in a digitisation project, for example, when the library does not have even a scanner or to talk about the Internet, if they are not able to pay for an Internet connection. Many such libraries do not need to know about contracts with publishers of electronic documents, if they do not have money to purchase electronic resources. However, our librarians hope that the situation will change and that our libraries will soon be in a position to co-operate better with EU partners. As a national library, we would consider joining several projects. However our library system must first be upgraded to be able to implement a Z39.50 server. I think that a workshop with project presentations, preferably in local languages, would be very useful." - CEE participant
Since the launch of the first Telematics for Libraries programme over nine years ago, there have been very rapid and fundamental changes in information availability and use. Advanced information technologies are widespread and new products and services are constantly emerging driven largely by consumer demand, rather than being technology-driven. In order to preserve their role as key intermediaries for scientific, technical and business information and as managers of Europe's cultural heritage, libraries need to be prepared to adapt to change, accept innovation and create new partnerships and alliances in the information society. The response to the first Telematics for Libraries programme illustrated the awareness among European libraries of the principal issues affecting the library world. The Telematics for Libraries programme under FP4 has maintained the momentum already established, helping to integrate European libraries into the much broader European information and communication infrastructure. The IST programme, with a budget of €3.6 billion (1998-2002), brings together and extends the ACTS (telecommunications), Esprit (information technologies) and Telematics Applications programmes of FP4 to provide a single and integrated programme that reflects the convergence of information processing, communications and media technologies. The programme offers a real opportunity for all the institutions (libraries, archives and museums) concerned with cultural heritage to develop joint practical experiences which can help address and find solutions to common problems and issues. It is an opportunity to create new partnerships and strategic alliances with the ICT industry, which can provide the tools and systems required for memory institutions to realise their full potential within Europe and to play a major role in creating a new "cultural economy" for the Information Society. This concertation meeting successfully marked that consolidation and transition.
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Teresa Hackett
Libraries Support TechServ Team
9 Rue Schiller
L-2519
Luxembourg
Tel: +352 49 24 291
Email: thackett@ip.lu
Teresa Hackett has most recently worked on the Libraries Support Team in Luxembourg, providing technical support and services to the Libraries Programme under the Fourth Framework Programme, on contract from the British Council. In addition to experience working in a variety of library services, Teresa has managed Customer Support for a UK library automation company, involving consultancy, project management, Help Desk, technical training and support worldwide. She later worked for the British Standards Institution, responsible for electronic product sales and development before joining the British Council Munich to set up and manage a new electronic Information Centre. Teresa is a graduate of University College, Dublin in German, History and Politics and has a postgraduate diploma in Library and Information Science from the Polytechnic of North London. She is a chartered member of the Library Association (UK) and an associate of the Institute of Information Scientists.
For citation purposes:
Hackett, T., "Consolidating the European Library Space",
Exploit Interactive, issue 4, January 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue4/mondorf/>
Florence Poncé reports on the third in the series of national information days on European Cultural Programmes.
This was the third in the series of national information days on European Cultural Programmes - an event which is traditionally organised by the French Federation of Libraries Cooperation [1] and the Bibliothèque Publique d'Information, Centre Georges Pompidou [2].
The goals of the information days are to inform French professionals on European cultural policy, research projects and work programmes (calls for proposals, take-up actions, etc.). The information days also provide an opportunity to obtain up-to-date information on specific areas, such copyright issues. Last but not least, they provide an opportunity to meet colleagues from libraries, archives and museums from all regions, and to strengthen the links between professionals in the various information and memory institutions.
A number of guests from other European countries are invited every year: in 1999 we had the pleasure to of visits by Ronald Milne, from the Edinburg University Library, Michela Michilli from the Consortio Civita in Rome and George Tsakarissianos, from the Lambrakis Research Foundation in Athens. From the European Commission we had the great pleasure to welcome Bernard Smith, head of the Cultural Heritage Unit.
The article has been written for an international readership. The article focusses on French policy in the field of digitalization cultural heritage, after a brief review of the conference programme. The report on the information days will be published in the spring issue of the Bulletin des Bibliothèques de France [3].
What is the role of culture in the European Union? This could have been the title of the first speech, by Hélène Herschel, from the Département des Affaires Internationales, Ministère de la culture et de la communication. A broad panorama of the "cultural european policy" was drawn by addressing questions such as: What is the place of cultural equipment in the use of the structural funds, inside the EU regional policy? How can memory institutions participate in research policy under the Fourth Research and Development Framework Programme (with Telematics for Libraries) and under the Fifth RD Framework programme in the User-friendly Information Society Programme, often called the Information Society Technologies programme? Hélène also informed us on the latest developments of the programme Culture 2000: an agreement on the budget will be made at the end of the year.
Following on from this on the second day we organized a joint session with the two French Focal Points in the cultural field:
Valérie Martino set out the Relais-Culture-Europe [4], National Focal Point for the DG X programmes. This NFP also coordinates the key action "City of tomorrow and cultural heritage" in the programme "Energy, environment and sustainable development". The Fourth European conference on the theme "Research for cultural heritage protection" will be organized in Strasbourg, 22-24 November 2000.
Christine Montagut explained the aims and tools of the Centre français du commerce extérieur [5], as National Focal Points for the programme User friendly information society. With Bernard Smith, they gave information on the October call.
Concrete examples of european projects were given by G. Tsakarissianos, from the Lambrakis Research Foundation (the TRENDS project) and Elisabeth Freyre, Bibliothèque nationale de France (the REYNARD project).
An update on copyright issues for digitalization was also presented by Michèle Battisti, from the Association des professionnels de l'information et de la documentation [6].
Diversity of national contexts and strategies was the subject of the morning of the second day. The comparison between Italy, United Kingdom and France provided an impressive example of cultural, institutional and political European diversity. The debate was extended to speakers from libraries, archives, museums and commerical entreprises such as Museums On Line [7] and Jouve [8].
I will develop on the ideas given in the presentation by Jean-Pierre Dalbera, Mission de la Recherche et de la Technologie, on French strategy. But it seems necessary, for the international readership of Exploit Interactive, to first describe the organisational background of this action.
In 1982 a policy of decentralization was launched in France which has changed the decision-making process in the cultural field.
The decentralisation is possibly the most important reform of the century in this area. In the sixties we used to speak about "Paris and the French desert", as Paris concentrated political and economical powers: this era now seems far away. The reform was based on the creation of a new administrative and political level, the régions: they were drawn by joining the "old" départements. This administrative change was completed by an important transfer of power from the central government to the various territorial authorities: the 36,000 communes (municipalities), the 96 départements (districts) and the 26 regions [9].
As a consequence territorial authorities have a great freedom in the cultural field.
At the same time the government created permanent representations of his central services in the 26 new regions: for example, the Directions Régionales des Affaires Culturelles (DRAC). The state intervention is very rarely defined from Paris, but more and more at the regional level [10].
In this context the decision-making process is mainly in the hands of the local authorities. The cultural funding from the state is mostly related to contracts between the State and each region or grants for specific programmes. Let us consider the case of digitalization.
The French policy in the field is defined by the PAGSI, Programme d'Action Gouvernemental pour la Société de l'Information, launched in January 1998 [11].
Culture is one of the six domains of the PAGSI, with education, public services, regulation/legislation, business, innovation. Cultural institutions are concerned mainly in two areas: (1) to provide public access, to encourage a new multimedia literacy and creativity and (2) to provide content that reflect social, regional, linguistic and cultural diversity.
Digitalizing cultural heritage is a part of this programme.
The "plan de numerisation" is based on regular calls, opened to all memory institutions. Projects are selected by an expert comittee, the "comité scientifique pour la documentation informatisée et le multimédia", as explained Jean-Pierre Dalbéra.
The Ministry Of Culture has contracted a global deal with a private society, after a European call to concurence, to digitalize public collections. Archives, libraries, museums submit their plan to the expert comittee. The budget of this programme has been increasing every year since 1996 (when it was 2.5 million francs) and will be 12 million francs in 2000. The results of the last three years are available on the Ministry Of Culture web site [12].
The central services have also an important mission of information on technical and legal aspects. The information is on the web site and information days are organized regularly.
In addition to this programme, the national institutions as the Bibliothèque nationale de France [13] or the Louvre museum have their own programmes of digitalization cultural heritage. The development of educational web sites [14] is a common trend.
The Internet abolishes distance: the reader of web pages can carry out the same navigation on web sites as we did the 26 November, using some links [15], [16] from the archaeological excavations in Dauphiné to medieval paintings in the south, or travel through French archives [17].
The fourth in the series of information days will be organized in Paris in December 2000, under the French presidency of the European Union.
Florence Poncé
Direction du livre et de la lecture
27 avenue de l'Opra
75 001 Paris
France
Tel: +33 1 40 15 73 44
Email: florence.ponce@culture.fr
Florence Poncé is in charge of European and
international issues in the Direction du livre et de la lecture,
Ministére de la culture et de la communication.
She is member of the Public libraries permanent committee in IFLA.
Formerly, she has managed the East European periodicals in a research library,
Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC) in Nanterre.
Florence is a graduate of Ecole Nationale Suprieur in Paris,
a Doctor in Soviet Geography and has a Librarian diploma from the
Ecole Nationale Suprieur des Sciences de l'Information et des Bibliothèques.
She is member of the Association des Bibliothcaires Français (ABF) and of BESEDA,
the French association of Slavic Librarians.
For citation purposes:
Florence Poncé, "Digitizing Cultural Heritage: Museums, Archives, Libraries in France",
Exploit Interactive, issue 4, January 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue4/information-days/>
Christine Dugdale reports on the Knowledge: Creation, Organization and Use conference held in Washington recently.
Knowledge: Creation, Organization and Use was the name of the ASIS (American Society For Information Science) Annual Conference that was held 31 October – 4 November, 1999 in Washington, D.C. [1]
The conference's declared aim was to look at current (and imminent) knowledge creation, acquisition, navigation, correlation, retrieval, management and dissemination methods, practices and potentialities, as well as their implementation and impact, and the theories behind these developments.
The conference sought to achieve this aim by a very diverse selection of contributed papers, panel discussions and SIG-arranged sessions that looked at different technological tools, theories, legal concerns and operational policies.
In particular, it set itself the very difficult task of trying to look at knowledge rather than information. This was because the organisers believed that information, transformed into shared knowledge, could change the face of work, education, and every other aspect of life. It was noted that, today, we have an increasing capacity to generate, gather, model, represent and retrieve more complex, cross-disciplinary and multi-format data and ideas from new sources and at varying scales than ever before. They particularly requested papers that reported on ‘real life’ results that listed both successes and failures and were able to offer recommendations to others.
Sessions were presented through five tracks:
It was, of course, very difficult to obtain a full flavour of all these tracks as they ran in parallel along with a bewildering array of SIG panels, discussions and business meetings. Delegates were encouraged to ‘mix and match’ sessions and even papers within sessions. Although the latter was a very disturbing trend for speakers and audience alike to which I did not like to add, I did take advantage of the apparent ASIS culture of attending full sessions in different tracks.
It would have been impossible to hear more than a minority of the presentations under the contributed paper category, as there were 236 papers. Apparently, these were selected from three times that number submitted. There were also 240 presentations made in 60 sessions to 1007 delegates from 31 different countries and six continents. Two hundred of these were first time attendees like me. Indeed, it was remarkable that there was not more confusion as I assume that they must have been as mystified as I was by all the peripheral meetings that were taking place under the headings of totally incomprehensible initials. We were, however, all clearly labelled with ribbons and badges that signalled our need to be ‘mentored’ – a signal that I was very careful to bin before leaving for the airport! (Although it might have led to meaningful jet-lagged relationships!)
This labelling, however, did not help me to penetrate the vast amount of mis-information about times and room numbers that was given out during the week. Some degree of confusion must have been inevitable when so many things were happening concurrently over two entire floors of the massive venue, but it was unfortunate that a society whose raison d’être is information science should have mis-informed delegates so often. I was forced, for example, to question whether a rather flattering large audience heard me because they had planned to do so or because they were really waiting for the entirely different session that was scheduled for that room on one set of documentation!
This audience, however, was not as large as the one that gathered for the plenary session. This occupied so large a space that two large screens were deemed necessary at either end of the room and this, like all sessions, was taped for those who could not hear or who had wanted to listen to two simultaneous sessions. The two screens, however, proved a little optimistic as the technology fell apart before the first speaker was able to show a single slide.
An excellent policy of starting and finishing each session on time was rigorously adhered to. It was also the first conference that I have attended for many years that was not disturbed by mobile phones, although several laptops merrily pealed as their users logged on or off.
One very welcome innovation was a plenary track overview session immediately after the opening speaker and an even more welcome wrap-up session to conclude the conference.
The first took the form of two concurrent sessions at which different track overviews were given before launching into papers and panels. Inevitably, this meant that some choices still had to be made and overviews of only two tracks could be heard. I thought, however, that this was something that other conferences that hold parallel sessions could emulate.
The wrap-up session, however, involved no such decisions and proved very valuable. During this, representatives of each of the conference tracks, along with other leaders, reflected upon discussions and presentations. This proved an ideal opportunity to hear about sessions that delegates had not attended and to check whether their own subjective interpretation of sessions coincided with that of others. Many of the wrap-up speakers, indeed, referred to the fact that so many papers were interrelated and that many might well have sat as easily if not more easily in other tracks. Initial conference ‘decisions’ have to be made based upon relatively short abstracts.
The following summary, therefore, is based upon both a personal impression of the conference and these presentations.
The plenary speaker, Tom Sudman, attempted to define Knowledge Management whilst making it clear that there are as many different definitions as there are people defining Knowledge Management at the moment. Later speakers raised the possibility that we might not, in fact, be effectively managing knowledge – however that might be defined. Sudman suggested that Knowledge Management is about transferring knowledge and not objects and that Knowledge Management entails adding value to information. He suggested that there is no automatic linear progression that enables information to lead to knowledge, and knowledge to wisdom. Data and information are on different paths to knowledge and wisdom. They may well lead to each other in real or virtual worlds, but this is not automatic. Data and information are artefacts of knowledge, but they are the properties of machines and media. Knowledge and wisdom are always in the human domain. No manager can ensure that information becomes knowledge. Individual human beings make that choice for themselves. This was echoed by a later speaker who recalled the words of T S Eliot in Choruses from “The Rock” when he asked where the wisdom was that has been lost in knowledge, and where the knowledge lost in information. We were also encouraged never to think about knowledge as a dead structure, but always as being something that is in continuous evolution. This is not to say, however, that information scientists cannot take data and information and arrange them in a meaningful way.
He thought that the important elements in Knowledge Management are people, objects, and value. Today that knowledge is frequently mediated through technology and this leads people to believe that knowledge management must involve technology and that technology automatically leads to knowledge management. It is true that technology is a constant of change in today’s world. The fact that reliance upon technology might be a weakness was then, unintentionally, highlighted when the venue’s technology broke down and he was unable to show his slides. We were re-assured that the entire presentation was available on the web, but this raised doubts in my mind as to just how valuable organisation of information, however well organised it might be, was when it was in ‘isolation’. What he had to say would have been far more valuable had we seen the illustrations as he said it than being invited to look at them later. Having the entire presentation available to everyone on the web in a well-structured way would have been a very valuable added bonus, but it should be that – a bonus, an ability to revisit ideas, and not a safety net. It might well have served as a lesson for today - that a simpler, less organised information set and attempts to organise and distribute knowledge might make a greater impact. Most conferences tend to have some technological failure!
He then went on to pick up the point most often made at conferences today and one that was referred to by several later speakers, that people are the most important element in the information world. Indeed, the speakers at the wrap-up sessions pointed to the fact that many abstracts that had suggested that they might be about more technical subjects had actually resulted in papers that could have been more appropriately placed under cultural, behavioural and social headings. The Ethical, Cultural, Social and Behavioural Aspects Track itself did look at many different types of people – individuals, groups and communities in general as well as particular populations such as children, students and engineers. There were papers about physical and ‘virtual’ public, school and academic libraries as well as museums and courts. It was suggested that managing information involved connecting people to each other and connecting people to information. It was not just making lots of information available. This is information management and not knowledge management.
People's information-seeking behaviour was closely examined in a number of reports of research findings. A general consensus appeared to be that people's greatest information-seeking needs were those of being able to find things as easily as possible within a single source that offered access to apparently infinite knowledge, but that this should be an individually customised source. Some papers illustrated the fact that there are many different concepts of users and their needs. Different people have different needs and all needs are valid. During questioning, however, the importance of libraries always meeting all of these needs was debated. It was suggested that some academic libraries might be catering to individual needs too well in the sense that students often expected to find all their information neatly packaged and easily available. Consequently, if the library provided this service, students then found it very difficult to search for themselves and, therefore, trace information for themselves later in life. One paper reported research findings that confirmed many of the impressions that many information scientists have – that, for example, most users are very confident about their searching abilities and that males tend to be more confident than women. But the findings also suggested that, in practice, there were few differences in the actual search abilities of many users. This proved to be true when a range of comparisons were made. There were few differences, for example, between males and females or between computer studies students and non computer studies students. Most worrying was the apparent lack of difference in ability between those who had received help from information professionals and those who had had no library instruction.
Despite the fact that technology had just let him down, Tom Sudman also claimed that there were far more cultural factors than technological elements contributing to the lack of success in knowledge management systems. He thought that the ratios were about 80% to 20%. Before any successful system can be introduced into an institution, it is necessary to gain as deep an understanding as possible of the institution's culture, the project that is being introduced and the demands that it will make upon that culture. Other speakers suggested that problems could arise when people have multiple-needs and usability demands, hold dual roles within an organisation and/or different relationships with all the other stakeholders. It is necessary to take a strategic approach to integrating IT with an organisational mission.
Sudman continued by suggesting that whereas a dialogue-driven process in networks of communities might be put on ‘auto-pilot’, a dialogue-driven process can never be. He concluded that the seat of knowledge is probably dialogue. Later speakers picked up this thought. It was suggested that social needs be incorporated into office needs. Archivists need to examine contexts closely rather than bring ideas about pre-conceived needs to a project and they always need to consider future as well as present needs. It is necessary to be both objective and subjective. Information providers and mediators need to be objective in that they should not impose their own values on subjective thought. They should maintain passivity and a distance, but their systems should be based upon subjective decisions made as a result of becoming more active by encouraging people who will use the service to become involved in its creation.
Many speakers echoed this thought and the important themes that seemed to emerge were those of collaborative work, the need for multi-skilled teams and cultural change. There were a number of papers about the ‘collaborative culture’ with a number of interesting examples to lead us to question just how much collaboration is going on and how useful it is. It is difficult to know how much real collaboration is actually taking place. It is very difficult to actually quantify the percentages of the number of projects in which people are collaborating in an interactive sense and those in which they are ‘collaborating’ in the sense that they are merely working alongside each other. This was only one thread that emerged from a number of papers about perceptional and conceptual issues that led to debates about the relationship of theory to practice. As always, today, thoughts about the divide between the information rich/information poor were voiced and it was suggested that people may be divided not merely by their physical access to resources, but also by their ability to learn the essential skills required to exploit information that they find. Today there is a cultural shift in the digital environment. We have now moved from those debates focusing upon our ability to use digitised information to those that are centred upon how we do use it. Many people use digital sources to automate current systems based upon print sources. Digital information is often not used innovatively to take knowledge further.
Other ‘hot’ topics were based upon intellectual property rights, discussion about the divide between electronic libraries and hybrid libraries, the design and architecture of interfaces. There was a great deal of concern amongst US speakers and delegates about the recent EU Database Directive. Discussion of this led to long exchanges about the possibility of global change research being badly effected if there are too many different rules from too many different countries. It seemed to me that there was some misinformation among delegates in relation to UK copyright laws and Crown Copyright.
There was also a lively discussion around the measurement of effectiveness. It was felt that users are often happy if they can see lots of sources, but that librarians should be more concerned about the resources that their clients use. They need to be both effective and efficient. It is often difficult to identify efficiency in a library because of the wide variety of inputs and outputs.
One speaker brought us all back to earth in this age of self-congratulation about the amount of information that we make available and all the wonderful ways in which we manage, publicise and disseminate it. We were told that ‘we moderns’ as a term was actually first used by a medieval writer. Twelfth century scholars thought of themselves as being very modern and that century saw an increase in writing that led to an explosion of information long before the invention of the printing press or the computer. We are not the first age to experience such a phenomenon.
The 2000 Annual Meeting will be held on 13-16 November 2000 at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, Chicago, Il.
Christine Dugdale
ResIDe Electronic Library
University of the West of England
Email: Christine.Dugdale@uwe.ac.uk
URL: <http://www.uwe.ac.uk/library/itdev/reside/>
Tel: 0117 965 6261 ext 3646
Christine Dugdale manages the ResIDe Electronic Library at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
For citation purposes:
Christine Dugdale, "Knowledge: Creation, Organization and Use",
Exploit Interactive, issue 4, January 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue4/asis/>
Brian Kelly describes developments to the Exploit Interactive web site.
The Exploit Interactive web magazine aims to provide information on Telematics for Libraries project work, and more general information of interest to the library and information professional. As well as its information dissemination role, Exploit Interactive enables UKOLN (the publishers of Exploit Interactive) to gain experience in the provision of a high quality web service and to use it as a proof of concept for its applied research interests.
In this article we summarise the technical architecture for Exploit Interactive, describes some recent innovations, and outline ideas for future work.
Exploit Interactive is hosted on a Windows NT server. The Microsoft SiteServer software is used, which provides a high-level web management system which sites on top of the Microsoft IIS web server software.
Articles are normally received using email. The articles are in either HTML (based on the Exploit Interactive article format) or Microsoft Word format. MS Word articles are converted to HTML using the import feature of an HTML authoring package - normally HoTMetaL.
Articles are stored as HTML fragments. The server-side include (SSI) technology is used to merge the article fragments with the navigational elements and other items in the header and footer. The server-side include technology also makes use of Active Server Pages (ASP) which enable resources to be processed into an appropriate format.
Searching Exploit Interactive has been enhanced through use of Dublin Core metadata. Each article has the author's name included as a DC.Creator Dublin Core attribute. The SiteServer's indexing component supports fielded searching, which enables searches on the author's name to be carried out, as illustrated below.
 Figure 1: Search Using the Author's Name |
As well as the author's name, Dublin Core metadata is also provided for a description of the article, which is normally taken from the initial lead-in paragraph of the article.
Issue 4 of Exploit Interactive sees the launch of an automated notification service. Readers who wish to be receive an email message when a new issue is available simply have to provide their email address on the notification page - http://www.exploit-lib.org/notify/.
The notification service, illustrated below, makes use of Netmind's Mindit service [1].
 Figure 2: Exploit Interactive's Notification Service |
As described in the article on Promoting Your project Web Site elsewhere in this issue [2] a number of tools are available which can be used to ensure that web resources are indexed by search engines or included in directory services. Use of a number of such packages was made recently. The results are summarised below.
| Date of Survey | Search Engine | No. of links |
| 17 Dec 1999 | AltaVista | 96 |
| Infoseek | 140 | |
| HotBot | 26 | |
| 7 Jan 2000 | AltaVista | 116 |
| Infoseek | 140 | |
| HotBot | 35 | |
| Today | AltaVista | Try it |
| Infoseek | Try it | |
| HotBot | Try it |
Although such results must be treated with caution, we intend to keep a record of the results, in order to detect trends.
We also investigated the number of pages from the Exploit Interactive web site which were indexed by three of the major search engines. The results are given below.
| Date of Survey | Search Engine | No. of Resources |
|
| 17 Dec 1999 | AltaVista | 91 | |
| Infoseek | 88 | ||
| HotBot | 4 | ||
| 7 Jan 2000 | AltaVista | 84 | |
| Infoseek | 95 | ||
| HotBot | 2 | ||
| Today | AltaVista | Try it | |
| Infoseek | Try it | ||
| HotBot | Try it |
Issue 3 of Exploit Interactive featured an analysis of NFP web site [3]. The article provides some suggestions for improving the dreaded 404 error message. The Exploit Interactive web site has implemented some of the suggestions: the 404 error message makes use of the Exploit Interactive style, contains a search interface and provides tailored messages, depending on whether the incorrect URL was entered directly or a link was followed, as illustrated below.
 Figure 3: A 404 Error Message |
For example, you should get a different message if you follow this invalid link or enter the invalid URL http://www.exploit-lib.org/foo directly.
The analysis of NFP web site mentioned above also suggested that web sites should make use of the Robot Exclusion Protocol by adding to the /robots.txt file the location of areas of the web site which should not be indexed by robot software. The /robots.txt file on the Exploit Interactive has been updated to prevent robots from indexing areas other than the main issues' directories.
A number of our readers reported difficulties in printing some articles. This is due to poor support for style sheets in certain versions of the Netscape browser. In order to overcome this problem we have introduced a simple test for the browser type. Netscape versions 3 and 4 will have a simple style sheet file embedded, which should overcome these difficulties. We have also made a number of minor changes to the default style sheets and provide a different style sheet for displaying on the screen and for printing.
These changes have been made for issue 4. If they appear to provide an improved service, we will update the back issues to link to the new style sheets.
We now provide a link to further information about each article. Currently this enables the articles to be checked for accessibility and conformance to HTML standards. Following experiments in the use of an automated translation service in issue 3 [4], we received a number of favourable comments ("Good idea to have a link to Systran. Have tried it with French and German, it's not bad as a starter! and Cool!). A link to the Babelfish translator is now included in the further information section. We are also testing a facility for providing statistics on accesses to articles.
We have introduced an online statistical analysis service, using analysis services provided by Nedstat [5] and SiteMinder [6]. A review of the service, together with other approaches to analysing web site statistics, will be featured in the next issues of Exploit Interactive.
Although this issue has seen a number of new developments releases we do not intend to stop development work. Ideas we are currently considering include use of a database for managing parts of the web site (e.g. article metadata, author details, etc.) and access to a range of statistics about the web site. Read the next issue of Exploit Interactive to find out how developments have progressed.
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
England
BA2 7AY
URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk>
Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus. He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath
For citation purposes:
Brian Kelly, "Behind the Exploit Interactive Web Site",
Exploit Interactive, issue 4, January 2000
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue4/exploit-interactive/>
Rob Davies reports on PubliCA's Something for Everyone conference and on a successful completion to the project
PubliCA reached the end of its period of EC funded activity on a high note with the successful Something for Everyone conference, held in Copenhagen on 14/15 October and attended by over 100 senior politicians, policy makers and professionals concerned with public library strategies, representing 31 European countries.
The conference considered the 'vital role of Public Libraries within the emerging Information Societies'. Those attending heard about the key roles already played by many European public libraries in encouraging community identity, economic development, lifelong learning and cultural diversity.
The participants agreed upon a joint declaration that requires key priorities to be addressed covering:
The English-language text of this Copenhagen Declaration is available on the PubliCA Web site [1]. The document is currently being translated into a number of European languages. The full conference programme is available on the site, where proceedings will also shortly be published.
The event was opened by the Danish Minister of Culture, Mrs. Elsebeth Gerner Nielsen. The keynote speech on the position of public libraries in relation to the information society was given by Mrs. Mirja Ryynänen, the former MEP responsible for the own-initiative report on the role of libraries adopted by the European Parliament in 1998 and now an MP in the Parliament of Finland. Among other important contributions was that made by the General Secretary of IFLA, Mr. Ross Shimmon on Public libraries and their role in terms of social inclusion, lifelong learning, cultural policy and economic growth. A session on national strategies was introduced by the President of EBLIDA Mrs. Britt-Marie Häggström and included contributions from Ireland and Portugal, together with a presentation on regional strategies through the filter of the ISTAR project [2] presented by Mr. Ioannis Koukiadis, MEP (Greece).
A special session on perspectives for the public libraries in regard to the ongoing developments in the IST Programme and RTD activities by Bernard Smith, Head of Unit, DG DG INFSO, unit D2, Cultural heritage application), encouraged the conference to look to the future.
The Commission's end-of-project Peer Review of PubliCA assessed its achievements in very favourable terms - focusing in particular - in addition to Something for Everyone, on the successful programme of in-service Training Attachments conducted during September and October 1999 and the extension during 1998 and 1999 of the activities of PubliCA to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The Training Attachments programme, which commenced in September 1999, provided a programme of 1-2 week attachments for Public Library Managers wishing to gain experience of new strategies and services for public libraries. The programmes were hosted at excellent Public Library services in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Slovenia and the United Kingdom respectively. The content and objectives varied, but all were driven by analyses of the training priorities of Public Library Managers in Southern, Central and Eastern Europe. Several of the training providers are considering the prospects for a sustainable future for in-service training activities.
All of those involved with PubliCA are now looking actively at ways to build upon and extend its momentum and to increase the impact upon the development and implementation of strategic policies for public libraries right across Europe. A focus of any future activity is almost certain to be assessment, within the context of IST, of the synergies with museums and archives and of future scenarios for the public library as an institution in the user-friendly Information Society.
Robert Davies, Director
Education for Change Ltd.
United House
North Road
London N79 DP
Tel: + 44 171 697 8881
Fax: + 44 171 697 8883
Email: rob.davies@efc.co.uk
URL: http://www.efc.co.uk/
You've received the official approval for a new web site. You want it to have a high profile: the funding body has specified a number of performance indicators which must be achieved. How do you promote the web site in order to maximise the readership? Brian Kelly gives some suggestions.
Many readers of this article will be involved in setting up new web sites, possibly for European or nationally-funded projects, for internal, institutional projects or perhaps for community projects. As the size of the web grows there is an increasing awareness of the need to be pro-active in promoting web sites - we can no longer simply sit back and expect visitors to arrive at our new site. This article describes a variety of approaches which can be taken to the promotion of a web site. The article is based on a presentation on "Promoting Your Project Web Site" [1] given at the "Consolidating The European Library Space" conference [2].
Many visitors to a web site will find the web site through use of a search engine. Although search engines can find new web sites automatically as they become linked into the web from existing web sites the growth in the size in the web is making it increasingly difficult for indexing robots to keep up. It is probably desirable to be proactive and submit resources to search engines when a web site is launched.
Many of the main search engines provide an option to "Submit a Resource". Figure 1 illustrates the interface for submitting a resource to AltaVista.
 Figure 1: Submitting a Resource to AltaVista |
Since there are a number of popular search engines and the search engines may limit the number of URLs which can be submitted it may be desirable to make use of a submission application or web service.
A large number of submission programs are available including WebPosition [3], NetSubmitter [4], RegisterPro [5], Engenius [6] and the Exploit Submission Wizard [7].
In addition to the submission programs there are a number of web-based submission services including Broadcaster [8] and Submit-it [9].
An illustration of one of these products (Web Position) is shown in Figure 2 (click to view enlarged image).
 Figure 2: Web Position |  |
The products for submitting resources to multiple search engines typically provide other functions as well, such as analysing your pages, reporting on your position in search engines, creating metadata, etc.
Web directories such as Yahoo! are an alternative to search engines. They also provide a popular location for searching for resources. Unlike search engines web directories are compiled manually. Web directories also provide an interface for submitting resources, as illustrated in Figure 3.
 Figure 3: Submitting a Resource to Yahoo! |
A number of the submission programs will automate the submission of resources to web directories as well as search engines.
Can we solve the promotion of our web site by simply purchasing a submission program? Unfortunately not. Due to the sheer size of the web search engines and directory services do not attempt to index all resources they find.
Some possible solutions to the challenges listed above follow.
If a project has its own domain name it is more likely to be catalogued by a directory service such as Yahoo! In addition it is more likely to be fully indexed by a search engine than if it was part of a large web site.
Since search engines are likely to index only a small part of a web site it may be desirable to control the areas of the web site which are indexed. For example you may wish to exclude personal information, draft resources or experimental work from being indexed.
The Robot Exclusion Protocol (REP) enables a web site administrator to specify areas of the web site which should not be indexed. The REP makes use of a robots.txt file located in the root of the web server. A typical robots.txt file is shown in Figure 4.
User-agent: * # Following apply to all robots Disallow: /cgi-bin/ # Don't index /cgi-bin directory Disallow: /tmp/ # Don't index /tmp directory Figure 4: A Typical robots.txt File
The robots.txt file has a simple format and can be managed by hand. However a number of tools are also available to help you manage this file, such as RoboGen [10].
Although the Robot Exclusion Protocol is conceptually very simply, in practice it may be difficult to exploit since updating the robots.txt file is likely to be restricted to the web site administrator. Fortunately there is now a HTML feature which enables authors of HTML pages to control access to their pages. The following HTML element located in the HTML HEAD:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
will prevent robots from indexing the resources and following links within the resource.
Further information on the Robot Exclusion Protocol and Robots META tag has been produced by Martijn Koster [11].
Avoid use of frames and splash screens in your web site design. As well as enabling indexing robots to access resources on your web site this also has additional accessibility benefits (visitors with browsers which do not support frames will still be able to access your web site).
Once the key pages in your web site have been indexed by a search engine you might expect a sensible query to retrieve the resources. Unfortunately the resource may fail to be located near the top of the search results. How can you improve the ranking?
Metadata may help to improve the ranking. Simple keywords and description metadata, as illustrated below is desirable since this metadata is used by a number of search engines, including AltaVista:
<meta name="keywords" content="exploit, web magazine, TAP, telematics"> <meta name="description" content="Exploit Interactive is a ..">
Dublin Core metadata provides a more comprehensive and standardised approach to metadata for resource discovery. Unfortunately it is not yet widely support by the major search engines. It is probably worth implementing Dublin Core metadata if you can make use of it to enhance local searching and you can address the maintenance of the metadata.
An example of an approach of the use of metadata to enhance local searching and the architecture to manage the metadata can be seen in the Exploit Interactive web magazine [12]. The search interface is illustrated in Figure 5.
 Figure 5: The Exploit Interactive Search Interface |
As illustrated in Figure 5 the search facility can be used to search the full text of articles, the author of an article (using the DC.Creator Dublin Core attribute) or the description (using the DC.Description Dublin Core attribute).
The metadata is stored in a neutral format (as variables in an "Active Server Page"). A server side include (SSI) is used to transform the metadata to the appropriate format. Currently the metadata is transformed into <meta name ="DC.Creator" ...> and <meta name ="DC.Description" ...>. However in order to provide the metadata in, say, RDF, it would simply require a single update to the SSI script.
The approach taken by Exploit Interactive provides enhanced searching for visitors to the web site, Dublin Core metadata which could be used by third party applications and an architecture which helps to minimise ongoing maintenance.
So far we have considered techniques which will ensure that a web site is indexed and ways of improving the ranking. We should also take into account the citation of web sites - for example URLs which are included in articles (both online and print), used in publicity materials or spoken (e.g. when giving talks or presentations or on the phone).
The domain name for the web site can affect promotion of a web site in a number of ways. For example short and memorable domain names:
UKOLN uses the name www.exploit-lib.org and www.ariadne.ac.uk for its Exploit Interactive [12] and Ariadne [13] web magazines. Both of these domain names are short and easy to remember.
Use of separate domain names or qualified domain names - sometimes used by departments (such as http://www.scs.leeds.ac.uk/) and sometimes for a particular function (such as Student Home Pages at Loughborough University - see http://www-student.lboro.ac.uk/) - appears to be on the increase. This is probably due to (a) the ease and low cost of obtaining domain names and (b) the increase in expertise and knowledge of running web servers.
As well as having a short, memorable domain name it is also desirable to make use of short URLs. Before releasing your web site it is useful to develop guidelines for URL naming conventions. Some suggestions are given below:
Jakob Neilson's AlertBox column provides some valuable comments on the "URL as UI" [14].
As well as the various suggestions on ways in which you can enhance the visibility of your web site you may also wish to consider giving the web site away! For example you could:
Figure 6 shows an interface for searching for medical information on the web which is available on the OMNI web site [15].
 Figure 6: The Interface for Searching for Medical Information on the Web at OMNI |
This type of interface is probably more likely to generate search requests than a page simply containing links to the remote search interface. There are dangers in encouraging remote web sites to install a search interface to you web site search engine, in particular change control if you decide to introduce a new or updated search engine. However this is an option you may wish to consider.
You may wish to give your entire web site away. A mirror of your web site may enhance its visibility. If this is an option for your web site you may need to structure your web site so that it can easily be mirrored. This will include using directories to delineate areas of your web site which are to be mirrored, appropriate use of relative URLs and, if possible, ensuring that, if you use server-side scripting for management purposes, you hide (or rewrite) unusual URLs. Although these days sophisticated mirroring and replication software is available it will probably make the mirroring task much easier if the site has been developed with mirroring in mind. It should also be noted that this may also help in the digital preservation for a web site.
This article has described submission engines to search engines and web directories and described web architectures which will help to make web sites more accessible to search engines. In should be noted that articles about your web site can help in its promotion. Articles in print and web publications should obviously raise the visibility. In addition web magazines may submit their pages to search engines and links in the pages may be harvested. Web magazine may also be made available on CD ROM, in free text systems, citation reports, etc. As an example a number of Ariadne articles have been cited in Current Cites [16].
If you have followed the various suggestions given in this article how can you evaluate the effectiveness and assess the benefits against the resources used?
One suggestion would be to monitor the number of links pointing to your web site. The LinkPopularity.com web site [17] enables the numbers of links, as recorded by a number of large search engines, to be measured as illustrated in Figure 7.
 Figure 7: The LinkPopularity.com Web Site |
Monitoring the number of links to your web site, and the growth of the number of links will be useful in evaluated the impact of your web site. It can also be of use if you wish to sell advertising space on your web site. As Roddy McLeod, manager of the EEVL gateway [18] mentioned in a posting to the lis-elib Mailbase list:
"I tried [LinkPopularity.com], pointing out to a potential advertiser that EEVL had, according to HotBot, 1099 sites linking to it, whilst there were only 18 sites linking to their site, and suggested that what they needed was more exposure. It seems to have worked, as they have agreed to buy an ad on the soon to be released new design EEVL site." [19].
Analysis of your web statistics can help in measuring the effectiveness of your web promotion strategy. A more thorough report on web statistics will be published at a later date. In this article mention will be made of analysis of access to web sites by robot software. The BotWatch software [20] can produce reports on access to your web site by robot software, as illustrated in Figure 8.
 Figure 8: BotWatch |
Ideally you will think about the promotion of your web site before the web site has been launched. A number of technical decisions which can help with web site promotion should be made before the launch as changes to a running service will be difficult to implement. However even if your web site is well-established many of the suggestions in this article will still be relevant.
Many of the suggestions given in this article on web site promotion will have additional benefits in other areas. For example:
Additional useful information on web site promotion is provided by Deadlock Design [21], SearchEngineWatch [22], VirtualPROMOTE [23], Pegasoweb [24], did-it [25] and Yahoo! [26].
Book reviews for "Poor Richard's Internet marketing and promotions: how to promote yourself, your business, your ideas online" [27] and "How to promote your Web site effectively" [28] have been published in the Internet Resources Newsletter.
A checklist of the points mentioned in this article follow.
/li>
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
BA2 7AY
Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus. He works for UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath
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