The UK eLib Project

by Bob Hopgood

---

In 1993, the UK Higher Education Funding Councils commissioned a review of academic libraries in the UK. This was chaired by Sir Brian Follett and its final report has been labelled the Follett Report (http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/follett/follett_report.html). As a direct response to this Report, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) established the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) which has a budget of 21 MECUs over 3 years.

There are about 60 projects looking at different aspects of digital libraries ranging from digitisation and provision of images at one end through making grey literature available to the commissioning of new electronic journals. There is a strong emphasis on support for teaching and learning as well as research. Also, the needs of the arts and humanities are well represented as well as science and engineering.

Just to give a brief flavour of the types of projects, here are some examples:

• ADAM: a UK Information Gateway to Art, Architecture, Design and Media Resources on the Web
• CogPrints: a Cognitive Sciences archive on the lines of the Los Alamos Physics Eprint Archive
• ESPERE: establishing an electronic journal in the biomedical area where the peer review process is also electronic
• Eurotext: an electronic resource bank of materials related to the European Union
• CLIC: creating an Electronic Version of Chemical Communications using standards developed for transmission of chemical information and presentation using VRML and Java
• JEDDS: developing a MIME-compliant delivery system for interlibrary loans and other applications.
• MIDRIB: creating a comprehensive collection of medical images in digital form.
• NETSKILLS: providing training in network skills for librarians.
• SOSIG: the Social Sciences Information Gateway.

This just gives a flavour of the types of projects supported. Web pages for all the eLib projects are located at: http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/elib/.

Another good source of information is ARIADNE, the Internet Magazine for Librarians and Information Specialists (http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/ariadne/)

Please contact:
Bob Hopgood - CLRC
Tel: +44 1235 446822
E-mail: frah@inf.rl.ac.uk