Bridget Robinson - lisbrr@ukoln.ac.uk
Welcome to the Agora news bulletin for August.
Board Meeting
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An Agora Board meeting was held in London on 26th July.
Robin Murray of FDI gave a demonstration of Agora release 2. Both the new functionality and the improved functionality from Release 1 were noted. All were pleased with the progress that has been made.The meeting discussed the draft annual report and future dissemination activities.
Library Associates - Case Studies
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After overcoming a range of installation and support issues at the Associate sites work, is progressing on all case studies. Preliminary sections of each case study are in the process of being drafted and will be placed in the Library Associates folder on BSCW. Mounting ongoing work on the BSCW site provides a valuable source of information for the Associates and a way of ensuring that all the case study work is shared across the sites.
The studies are scheduled to finish on 18th August, with the final reports due in September.
Dissemination
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David Palmer and Bridget Robinson have just completed an article in collaboration with Verity Brack (University of Sheffield). It covers the background and results of the eLib working group on Collection Level Descriptions (CLDs) and the implementation of CLDs in both RIDINGS and Agora. It will appear in a special edition of D-lib in September.
A project briefing for Service Providers has been organized for 19th October 2000. This will take place at the British Universities Film and Video Council in London. It will offer an update of the project so far, a demonstration of Agora Release 2, and a chance to feedback experiences, comments to the project team. Information from this event, plus feedback from other events, will contribute to a series of strategic briefing papers to be published towards the end of the year.
The Hybrid Library dissemination event will take place on 1st November 2000 at the British Library. All of the 5 eLib Phase 3 Hybrid Library projects will be taking part. The plan is to have presentations in the morning and a series of workshops in the afternoon - this will allow the delegates to spend some time assessing the different project demonstrations. Lynne Brindley will give the key-note address and the closing address will be from the DNER team.
Greg Newton-Ingham will be attending the 4th Institutional Web Management workshop at the University of Bath in September.
He will act as a facilitator for a parallel session on the Joined-up Web. Agora will be represented by way of a poster display and demonstrations.