Hi

This is the first of the planned monthly news bulletins for people directly involved in AGORA – this includes the board, the project team, library associates and service provider associates. Future regular bulletins will appear at the end of the second week of each month; please send me any material you’d like to go in at the beginning of that week.

A two-day meeting was held at UEA this week for team and board members. The main aims were to provide training on PRINCE2 project management methodologies (Greg very effectively boiled down several PRINCE volumes into 34 slides) and to discuss which bits should be used by AGORA. The need for some divergence from PRINCE was recognised – eg in the recommended organisational structure. However in other areas such as ‘change control’, a more formalised PRINCE approach which provides greater clarification (via audit trails) was seen to be useful.

Risk assessment, quality assurance and evaluation were also discussed. Greg will be writing up outcomes from the meeting.

The meeting also successfully doubled as a team bonding exercise :-)

The AGORA prototype will be delivered by Fretwell Downing as planned next Friday, 31 July and demonstrated to the project board and team in Sheffield. We hope to provide access to 10-12 social science-based services via the prototype – both bibliographic and non-bibliographic (see the service description document distributed on 6 July for further info). A board meeting will be held in Sheffield on the same day.

The software will then be installed on a server at UEA and David Palmer (Library Group Coordinator) will conduct a series of demonstrations at library associate sites around the country; these will be used to seek feedback which will be used in developing the first ‘real’ AGORA hybrid library management system (due summer 99).

UKOLN has advertised the remaining half of the AGORA post to be based at UKOLN. The post will work across both AGORA and MODELS and provide technical development and research. The closing date for applications is 30 July 1998; a number of expressions of interest have been received. Information is at:

<URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/vacancies/>

I’ll be working over the next couple of months on setting up the planned web environment to facilitate project communications.

Cheers, Rosemary