Welcome to the June/July bulletin. We decided to revert to a mid-month schedule, so this bulletin covers June to mid-July.

Fretwell Downing have notified us that there will be a delay of approximately six weeks in the delivery of Agora Release 1. The anticipated date for installation at UEA for testing before delivery to the other library associates is 1 September (the scheduled date was 16 July). This will have an impact on the timing of the evaluation phase; late September/October is clearly a very busy time for the library associates so replanning is currently being undertaken.

FDI has been testing access to the range of Z39.50 targets selected by UKOLN in conjunction with the library associates.

A meeting was held with OCLC to discuss access to FirstSearch databases. The ‘base package’ of 14 databases has been offered initially but they are also prepared to consider access to a number of others (this is regarded as an extended trial period). Since there are over 80 in total, the library associates have been asked to highlight those which would be particularly useful for users in the Agora evaluation phase. OCLC also agree that it would be interesting for them to provide access to several full text databases (eg ABI/Inform).

A meeting was held on 8 June in Sheffield on information landscaping and collection level description (CLD). The aim was for FDI to demonstrate development to date and seek feedback from the eLib phase 3 projects using VDX - Agora, Music Libraries Online and RIDING.

There were various discussions about how the landscape should be presented/selected by users. The projects agreed that the interface needs to demonstrate relationships between targets and collections in a more meaningful way - eg the interface demonstrated allows the user to select a collection that is part of a target and initiate a search, unaware that the entire target will be searched, rather than the discrete collection.

Followup meetings for the three eLib projects were held in London on 15 June and 15 July. We have jointly developed an eLib collection description scheme, based on RIDING work. It is closely based on the attribute set developed by the national working group, coordinated by UKOLN. Some ‘qualifiers’ have been added, to make it appropriate for local use. The scheme is being implemented within VDX.

A major issue is the use of a controlled vocabulary for subject/keywords. Agora and RIDING have decided to adopt a pragmatic solution and will be using a simple scheme with a limited number of broad subjects. It is based on the M25 and Research Assessment Exercise lists of subject terms. We will be able to find how useful users find this approach in the evaluation exercises.

A meeting to draft an international interoperability profile is being held in Bath on 15-17 August, organised by UKOLN. It will involve around 10 international participants who have been involved in the development of Z39.50 profiles to support national or domain communities, including the Texas, MODELS, vCuc and ONE profiles. The international profile is likely to be based on the Texas profile. The meeting is being supported by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils. JISC is currently pursuing the vision of a Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER), in which Z39.50 forms an important mechanism for enabling distributed, integrated, cross-searching of JISC-funded (and other) data services. The ZILS Profile could offer a valuable means of linking diverse systems.

UKOLN is organising a small consultative meeting at the end of July to address the current MIA requirements analysis study (discussed in the May bulletin). A set of generic ‘scenarios’ is being developed to capture the basic functionality of hybrid information systems. We aim to elicit requirements for specific hybrid information environments and seek views on how well our work to date supports service development needs. Output will feed into the study which will then be presented at the MODELS workshop in October 1999. The final output aims to provide support for organisations that wish to provide various forms of hybrid information service.