David Palmer will be will visiting Heriot-Watt on 21 October, University of Hull on 22nd, and Bath Spa University on 23rd. He will be demonstrating Agora to at least six staff per site, drawn from various sections within each institution. Evaluation will take place not only at the demonstration but also afterwards, as with the demonstration on 23 September. The attendees will therefore have the opportunity to work with Agora and comment on it and on the concept of hybrid library gateway systems. A demonstration later in November for staff from BT and UEA is also planned.

Planning is proceeding for the next steps, with the intended focus being the identification of contentious issues or areas of concern and importance, which will be addressed in meetings between the library associates. The consensus from these meetings will add to the feedback already gathered and form the basis for succeeding iterations of Agora.

The meeting for technical experts (as discussed in the August bulletin), is being held on 2 November in London. It will include demonstration of the prototype and discussion of issues arising. In parallel with the feedback from library associates, it will inform the development of the next stage.

We are also trying to organise a meeting for the service providers at the end of October/beginning of November. This would again provide an opportunity to demonstrate the system, seek feedback, discuss issues and future participation. However services are widely dispersed geographically, so if it is not possible to hold this within the required timescale, an online discussion forum will be held instead.

Agreement with service providers drafted

A meeting was held with representatives from IBSS and LSE Archive to discuss a range of issues including access. As a followup to this, a document outlining the role of service providers has been drafted, to form the basis of an agreement. It has been sent to service providers for comment.

The document suggests that prototype access should be extended to the service providers as a group, to enable ongoing comments and feedback.

Data security

Password protection for the prototype website was requested by service providers. This has been implemented by FDI and all those currently with access rights (core project staff and library associates) have been informed.

UKOLN is currently carrying out a formal evaluation of several ‘groupware’ products, which will support communication within the project (including eg email, chat, workflow and collaborative editing systems). BSCW still appears to be the front-runner.

BSCW trial

In parallel with this evaluation, we are conducting a trial of a subset of the BSCW software. It is being used to gather feedback from the library associates based on the on-site demos this week. Library associates will also be shown some other BSCW components in order to provide a feel for the system, but only the ‘message board’ functionality will be used at this stage.

If we do go ahead with using BSCW, implementation will be phased, with the essential features introduced first, and proceeding to eg videoconferencing in the longer term.

As a followup to the meeting organised by UKOLN in September, the working group report on work in progress, together with the proposed list of core collection description attributes are now available from:

<URL:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/cld/>

Greg Newton-Ingham and Rosemary Russell gave a presentation on Agora at the hybrid libraries regional workshop at the University of Leeds on 15 October, addressing ‘building the technological infrastructure’. GNI led a breakout session on technological infrastructure and RR one on metadata and collection level description. Over 60 people attended and positive feedback was received. Holding a regional event seems to be a good way of reaching library staff in the wider community.

Agora also took part in a meeting between the German NRW (Nordrhein-Westfalen) project and eLib phase 3, on 16 October. NRW plans to develop hybrid libraries as part of their programme. The aim of the meeting was to share experience and establish future points of contact.

The next event at which Agora will be giving a presentation is the Hybrid Libraries workshop organised by Aslib on 25 November in London, which will have a technical focus.

Rosemary