Welcome to the Agora news bulletin for May.
Board Meeting
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An Agora Board meeting was held in London on 12th May. The meeting discussed the Evaluation report produced by CERLIM, some of the technical issues concerning release 2 and the case study proposals
Library Associates (contribution from David Palmer, UEA)
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With Easter taking up much of late April and early May, there is only a limited amount to report from the Library Associates. The major task was the drafting and submission of the user case study proposals for each institution that were agreed to in the meeting on 19 April. The proposals were considered and accepted in principle at the Board meeting on 12 May. The proposals themselves cover a wide variety of topics, including interlending within the Agora system, training needs/issues raised by the HLMS concept, benefits of cross-domain searching as seen by different user types, effectiveness of the 'landscape' concept, use of the Agora HLMS by distance learners, and a comparative study with a commercial product to assess the HLMS as against more traditional types of database access. Training needs are currently being addressed by the Associates, and it is hoped that installation training and design of the case study tools will be finished in the next month leaving part of June, all of July and part of August for performance of the case studies. A basic timetable for completion of the case studies has been agreed and it envisages final case study reports being delivered to the Project by 1 October 2000. As part of the process of performing the case studies, the Associates will also be creating a range of tools to assist their staff and users take best advantage of the functionality of Agora Release 1.
Installation
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After much work at UEA the servers have been shipped and received by the Library Associates. Supporting documentation is being provided to cover the technical requirements and help text will be available to facilitate the use of the information landscapes on Agora. Installation should be completed during the next few weeks.
Dissemination
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Interest in Agora continues to grow with the Statement of Requirements being seen as one of the major achievements of the project. It is the first time that a complete functional specification has been put together for the Hybrid library. A communication and dissemination plan is in progress and will be presented at the next board meeting.A range of events will be scheduled for later in the year including a Service Associate update event in the autumn and some joint events with the other Hybrid Library projects. Brian Kelly from UKOLN will be including Agora in his poster"Approaches to Indexing in the UK Higher Education Communities" This is being presented at the WWW9 conference in Amsterdam.
Collection Level Description
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An article outlining the Agora experience is being drafted in conjunction with the RIDINGS project. I will be attending an OCLC seminar later this month, which will be looking at collection assessment tools. It will be interesting to compare this with the Agora CLD work.