Good practice guidance for library and information professionals - moving towards accessible e-book platforms

Good practice guidance for publishers and procurers of e-book platforms based on the benefits and barriers identified by robust testing using real people with disabilities

Blackburn College: DIY! College departments catalogue their own technologies on Library Management System for loan

Blackburn College is making use of its Heritage Library Management System (LMS) for a wide variety of loans beyond that of books; this has enabled them to better manage the growing numbers and types of technologies that are being used in teaching and learning. In an additional pilot development, they have taken the bold step of training college departments in cataloguing their own technologies to add to the LMS for loan. This has enabled the departments to keep track of their own equipment easily, and provided a more consistent approach to equipment loan within the College.

KEITS Training Services: Moving to Mobile - assessment with Blackberry devices

Work-based learning provider, KEITS has improved efficiencies and institutional effectiveness with the introduction of Blackberry mobile devices to all their assessors. They have saved time and money on paper and travel, diversified evidence capture and improved their overall engagement with learners.

Crossing the Threshold: Moving e-portfolios into the mainstream

Crossing the Threshold, one of a series of advice and guidance publications, is designed to support use of the online e-Portfolio Implementation Toolkit and video case studies by those involved in wide-scale implementation of e-portfolios in their institutions. As the resources address the needs of both managers and practitioners, the publication has relevance for a wide range of readers in further and higher education and work-based learning. To assist the planning and effective management of a large-scale e-portfolio implementation, Crossing the Threshold follows the stages of an implementation journey with insights and guidance drawn from the toolkit and its supporting case studies. Links are provided throughout the publication to more detailed information in the two online resources.

EMBL-EBI: moving, sharing and controlling large datasets

Supporting presentation slides as part of the Janet network end to end performance initiative

Authority files: Breaking out of the library silo to become signposts for research information

Authority files serve to uniquely identify real world ‘things’ or entities like documents, persons, organisations, and their properties, like relations and features. Already important in the classical library world, authority files are indispensable for adequate information retrieval and analysis in the computer age. This is because, even more than humans, computers are poor at handling ambiguity. Through authority files, people tell computers which terms, names or numbers refer to the same thing or have the same meaning by giving equivalent notions the same identifier. Thus, authority files signpost the internet where these identifiers are interlinked on the basis of relevance. When executing a query, computers are able to navigate from identifier to identifier by following these links and collect the queried information on these so-called ‘crosswalks’. In this context, identifiers also go under the name controlled access points. Identifiers become even more crucial now massive data collections like library catalogues or research datasets are releasing their till-now contained data directly to the internet. This development is coined Open Linked Data. The concatenating name for the internet is Web of Data instead of the classical Web of Documents.