Hi! Welcome to the first Agora bulletin of 1999. Not quite so many happenings this month, given the Dec/Jan break.

On 6 January the library associates met to continue, and finish, their work of reviewing the Requirements Catalogue. Thanks to the contribution from all the associates and also from David Kay and Rosemary Russell, the associates reached a consensus on the requirements, their priority and the release of Agora to incorporate them. The resulting document was forwarded to Fretwell-Downing for their examination in light of the resources and time parameters of the project.

On 13 January Michael Breaks (Senior User), Neil Smith, Greg Newton-Ingham and David Palmer met to address any final areas of contention within the requirements. As a result of this meeting, all substantive requirements agreed by the associates (in the meetings of 16 Dec and 6 Jan) are within the Agora specification, with the only modifications being the Agora release in which some of the requirements will appear. Accordingly, Michael Breaks was able to give his assent as Senior User to the Requirements Catalogue as agreed to in this meeting.

Planning has begun on the work of the library associates over the next stage and February will see those plans being finalised.

On 25 January Rosemary Russell took part in a RIDING working group meeting on collection level description (CLD). RIDING is the Yorkshire and Humberside clump project, which is also using FDI’s VDX software. RIDING has similar CLD needs to Agora, although a major difference is that RIDING is dealing with library catalogues only (for the moment). It has proposed use of a sub-set of the collection description attribute set drafted last year by a national working group and edited by UKOLN. (The RIDING ‘sub-set’ will have several additional fields, such as alternative title and URL.) As discussed in the November bulletin, Agora will also be using this attribute set. RIDING will provide sample CLDs to FDI in February; results from incorporating this data into VDX will be used when Agora CLDs are supplied around May. In the meantime, Agora needs to decide the mandatory attributes required to adequately describe hybrid collections.

* VINE – submitted article on ‘Collaborative workspace environments: experience of evaluation and selection in the Agora project’ (Tracy Gardner and Rosemary Russell). Draft text available at:

<URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/bscw/bscw.cgi/0/4116>

* New Review of Information and Library Research – Agora paper on ‘Mining the information landscape’ submitted – based on the Agora paper at the eLib phase 3 conference in December (Rosemary Russell)

* Library Association UC&R Relay journal – article in preparation for March/April 1999 issue (Rosemary Russell)