Welcome to the April bulletin - the end of the month seems to have come around very quickly...

April was a time of meetings and decisions for the library associates in which the groundwork was laid for their work in the next stage of the project.

The associates, Agora staff, and Geoff Butters of CERLIM met on 16 April in London with a full agenda of items. Greg Newton-Ingham provided an introduction to the project plan which afforded much appreciated context to the work plan. The associates reviewed and approved the draft work plan for the group for the next stage. They also commented on a draft list of resources to be integrated within release 1 of the Agora system and agreed the parameters for services to be included. Finally, Rosemary Russell led a training session to increase familiarisation with the BSCW system, our primary mode of communication within the project.

As an outcome of the meeting, David Palmer has produced a draft list of documentation and local configurations required by the system. These lists will be reviewed by both the library associates and Fretwell-Downing to ensure that there is agreement on the work required in the next stage of the associates, Agora project members and Fretwell-Downing. These lists will be posted shortly on the BSCW workspace.

UKOLN has designed a new structure for the Agora BSCW workspace, based on comments received. This is designed to make navigation around the workspace easier. All the material from the current structure has been transferred over. Some of the early project documents held at UEA will also be mounted for reference. The new structure can be accessed by team members and associates at:

<URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/bscw/bscw.cgi/0/26471>

Some final adjustments to the structure (eg layout within group workspaces) will be made during next week, when it will be renamed Agora (currently has the transitional name 'New Agora Layout').

One of the requirements when designing the new structure was to have a private workspace for each Agora group. However much of the work associated with a particular group is not actually private. Therefore we created a workspace for each group, but all Agora team members and associates have access to it. Information that is private to a group will be placed in the 'Private' folder inside their workspace. This avoids having duplicate copies of documents in different places.

As mentioned above, we also held a BSCW familiarisation session as part of the library associates meeting on 16 April (which included several team members). Participants said that they found this very useful and gained experience of using additional BSCW features. Based on this session, we are producing a BSCW tutorial document, with guidelines for Agora. Comments on the new structure were also positive. We would welcome any further comments from other Agora participants, which can be posted to:

<URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/bscw/bscw.cgi/0/35973>

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Rosemary Russell participated in the European Library Automation Group (ELAG) 99 meeting in Bled, Slovenia on 21-23 April. This is an invitational annual meeting of librarians and systems managers, with an interesting mix of nationalities (only one from UK). There were around 60 participants. The theme was managing multimedia collections. RR presented a paper on Agora (with some background on eLib and hybrid libraries) and co-chaired (with Johan van Halm from the German NRW project - similar to a regional hybrid library) a workshop on 'access to heterogeneous information sources'. It appears that there is little similar work being undertaken elsewhere is Europe.

ELAG info at: <URL:http://www.nuk.uni-lj.si/elag99/>

The theme of next year's meeting (in Paris) is archives, libraries and museums convergence, again of relevance to Agora.

Rosemary Russell, UKOLN
30 April 1999