Bridget Robinson - lisbrr@ukoln.ac.uk
The last months work as detailed by David Palmer, has highlighted a range of installation and support issues at the Associate sites. These will provide invaluable material for the evaluation process, as well as input to the proposed strategic briefing papers. Similarly access to resources continues to be a challenging task providing the project with a real test of the hybrid library concept
Library Associates - (contribution by David Palmer UEA}
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Installation and Case Studies
The past month has been one of activity for the Library Associates as installation of Agora was finalized in some cases, whilst in others, training on the administrative client was given. Case study schedules were finalized with each of the Associates, setting milestones for completion.
David Palmer visited Heriot-Watt, Hull and UKOLN in late June to offer training and tips on working the Admin Client software. In addition, the timeframe and work schedule for each Associate case study was agreed in these meetings.
Work will be starting soon on the preliminary sections of each case study within each Associate Library.
A section has been established within the BSCW site where each site can post their work and where other Associates can view it. The idea is to allow all the Associates to be able to review each other's work and exchange ideas regarding the case studies. It also allows other members of the Agora Team and Board to view the work in progress.
Agora Resources
Efforts are continuing to improve resources within Agora with much work devoted to OCLC resources. With the full and active co-operation of OCLC technical staff in Dublin, Ohio, we will hopefully have the full dataset for the selected OCLC resources displaying full results very shortly. Work also continues on improving the results obtained from other resources with recent work improving the quality of response and results from AHDS. Work still continues to improve access to resources such as SOSIG and BUBLink."
Dissemination
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An article entitled "Agora - information maze to market" appeared in the June issue of Ariadne. It offers an update on Agora, including progress and achievements to date, plus a review of the user case studies. The article is being used by some of the Associates as background information for users participating in the studies.
Plans for a Hybrid Library Event in the Autumn are well underway. It is hoped that there will be presentations from Agora, MALIBU, HeadLine and HyLife plus a speaker from the DNER.
Other dissemination events and a series of strategic briefing papers are being planned to incorporate the interests of all Project Stakeholders as outlined in the Agora Project Plan - 20/04/99.
David Palmer attended Interlend 2000 in Dublin and Greg Newton-Ingham attended "Bringing Coherence to Networked information for the New Century", a UKOLN co-ordinated JISC/CNI Conference which was held in Stratford-upon-Avon in June.
The next Agora board meeting will be held on 26th July 2000.