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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 52| August 2001


Working at the Office of the Distributed National Electronic Resource

Debbie Campbell

The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) is a funded project of the United Kingdom’s Joint Information Systems Committee (www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/). The DNER is a managed collection of resources underpinned by an integrated environment that will be accessible to learners, educators and researchers within the United Kingdom. A relatively small number of staff draw together a wide range of activity for the Higher and Further Education sectors.

The DNER Office, with the assistance of colleagues from the sectors as well as research and development agencies such as UKOLN (www.ukoln.ac.uk/), licenses content on a national basis, coordinates exploratory projects and leads development work in a range of areas of interest to information providers in academic libraries, universities and colleges. Issues addressed by the projects include how to integrate discovery, access, and delivery to disparate forms of content such as print, image, video, and geospatial data; transparent authentication between services; and linking between pre-existing services.

Many of the service provision issues being explored by the Office also exist within the cultural sectors, for example, the application of metadata schemas to different materials; the use requirements of both inexperienced and mature end-users and the impact of information literacy; and how to determine strategies for ensuring awareness and continued use of newly-developed, high-quality services. The Office has collaborative working relationships with the British Library and the Public Record Office amongst others, to facilitate the ‘joined-upness’ of government services in Britain.

During my three-month visit, I worked on a wide range of initiatives. The first task was to scope a national image portal suitable for use by both the Higher and Further Education sectors. This raised questions about whether navigational requirements were different for the audiences of the two sectors.

A second task was to explore ways of integrating searching of the subject gateways in the Resource Discovery Network, which is currently managed out of the DNER Office (www.rdn.ac.uk). New directions such as this tend to be all labelled ‘portal’, and this initiative was no exception. Nevertheless, the interesting dilemma of whether to centralise all access from a single entry point or whether to support distributed searching was much discussed. Exploring the impact of this dilemma on technical architectures was a third task.

The collaborative and inclusive approach of the staff made it easy to learn a lot about how services to the education sectors are developed. It was a privilege to share ideas and outcomes with a committed and enthusiastic group of people.
—Debbie Campbell

Above, right: Debbie Campbell

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