1. See The Tavistock Institute, An Evaluation Plan for the Arts and Humanities Data Service. Public Draft Version 1.0 (June 1998) available from http://ahds.ac.uk/bkgd/evalplan.html; and AHDS Steering Committee, Arts and Humanities Data Service. Interim Evaluation. Report (September 1998) available from http://ahds.ac.uk/bkgd/inteval.html.
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2. Information Technology in Humanities Scholarship, British Library R & D Report 6097 (London, 1993); Report of the Funding Councils' Libraries Review Group (London, 1993); Lou Burnard and Harold Short, An Arts and Humanities Data Service. Report of a Feasibility Study Commissioned by the Information Services Sub-committee of the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils (Oxford, 1994).
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3. For more information about the JISC and its activities see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/.
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4. The consortium includes the universities of Birmingham, Bradford, Glasgow, Kent at Canterbury, Leicester, Newcastle, Oxford and York, and the Council for British Archaeology. For more about the ADS see http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/.
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5. See http://hds.essex.ac.uk/.
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6. The figure substantially underestimates the size of the collection since any one dataset (e.g., the 1881 Census of Great Britain), may itself comprise literally millions of records and/or dataset subsets.
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7. The figure substantially underestimates the extent of the collections since a single digital resources may be a large corpora comprising 10s or even 100s of individual electronic texts.
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8. The consortium also includes the University of Newcastle and Northumbria, and the Glasgow School of Art.
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9. Collections include the Imperial War Museum Image database, the Zone Gallery (mirror), the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture, and two data resources which are accessible via the VADS but managed elsewhere and including the Toyota Project and the Internet Library of Early Journals.
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10. See N. Beagrie and D. Greenstein, Managing Digital Collections A Compendium of AHDS Standards and Best Practices (December 1998), from http://ahds.ac.uk/manage/manintro.html.
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11. See N. Beagrie and D. Greenstein, A Strategic Policy Framework for Managing and Preserving Digital Collections (August 1998) available from http://ahds.ac.uk/manage/manintro.html.
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12. The framework forms part of the AHDS Collections Policy. See Beagrie and Greenstein, Managing Digital Collections, (Op. cit. See note 10.)
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13. More on these activities is available in Interim Evaluation Report (Op. cit., see note 1)
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14. See S. Porter and D. Greenstein, Scholars’ Information Requirements in the Digital Age (September 1998), available from http://ahds.ac.uk/public/uneeds/un0.html.
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15. This section is based heavily on D Greenstein, "Discovering resources across the humanities: an application of the Dublin Core and the Z39.50 network application protocol" in "Information landscapes for a learning society. Networking and the future of libraries" (UK Office for Library and Information Networking, forthcoming).
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16. ADS uses Fretwell-Downing Informatics' SQL-based OLIB VDX; HDS uses the SGML-aware Cheshire system developed consortially by the Universities of Berkeley and Liverpool; the OTA uses Open-Text's SGML-aware PAT system; PADS uses an object-oriented product supplied by Hyperwave; and for VADS, the Index+ system is supplied by System Simulation.
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17. Thus, the ADS applies a catalogue record based upon the National Geospatial Data Framework. (See http://www.ngdf.org.uk/.) The HDS uses the documentation standard being developed by an international community of history and social science data archives, the Data Documentation Initiative's Codebook. (See http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/DDI/.) The OTA uses the Text Encoding Initiative's recommendations for SGML-encoding of electronic texts and, thus, the associated TEI header. (See http://etext.virginia.edu/TEI.html.) The PADS uses a proprietary format which reflects the lack of consensus within the performing arts community around any cataloguing standard. (See Celia Duffy and Catherine Owen, Resource Discovery Workshops. Moving Images and their Resource Discovery Workshops. Sound Resources. Both are available from http://ahds.ac.uk/manage/metareps.html.) The VADS employs another proprietary format but, here, because standards proliferate within its particular domain. The VADS's catalogue record maps onto any one of the major standards currently being applied within the visual arts. (See Tony Gill, Catherine Grout, and Louise Smith, Visual Arts, Museums & Cultural Heritage Information Standards. A domain-specific review of relevant standards for networked information discovery http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/standards.html.)
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18. The MARC format makes claims for such flexibility but these are reasonably contentious.
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19. See P. Miller and D. Greenstein eds., Discovering Online Resources Across the Humanities: A Practical Implementation of the Dublin Core (UKOLN, 1997) from http://ahds.ac.uk/public/metadata/discovery.html.
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20. Discovering Online Resources Across the Humanities (Op. cit. See note 19.) Individual reports from Service Providers are available from http://ahds.ac.uk/manage/meta.html, and mappings from Service Providers own catalogue formats to Dublin Core will be available in Managing Digital Collections (Op. cit. See note 10.)
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21. See information about the MODELS 5 and MODELS 7 meetings, "Managing access to a distributed library resource" and "The MODELS Information Architecture (MIA): deployment", respectively. Both are available from http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/dlis/models/. For a detailed statement of requirement for the AHDS's suite of interoperating systems, see D. Greenstein, AHDS Systems Operational Requirement http://ahds.ac.uk/public/ahds-or/ahds-or.html.
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22. The systems were procured from several suppliers selected through an open tender process. Although the involvement of multiple suppliers complicated the project management side of the procurement, it tested the robustness of the standards based architecture.
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23. See http://firth.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ota/public/catalogue/catalogue.shtml.
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24. See http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/.
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25. See http://prospero.ahds.ac.uk:8080/ahds_live/.
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26. AHDS Interim Evaluation. Report (Op. cit. See note 1.)
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