Board business
The major item of business for the Board has been implementation of the Strategic Directions 2000-04 and this is covered under the different taskforces. The Board will shortly be undertaking a major review of membership. For more information contact Clive Field or Chris Bailey.

CURL Strategic Directions and Taskforces
Each group now has a web page where information about membership of the groups, their respective remits and summaries of main business items discussed will appear.

Resource Discovery and Description Steering Group

CURL database to switch to MARC21

RD&D has been monitoring the move within member libraries from UKMARC to MARC21 over the last two years and at the last meeting noted that as the membership was divided more or less equally between the two formats, but with the trend quite clearly in the direction of MARC21 and with far more records starting life as MARC21 than as UKMARC, the decision was made to recommend to the Board of Directors that the CURL database switch to MARC21. The Board accepted this proposal and it was endorsed unanimously at the members’ meeting on 3 October. The process of change will be a gradual one and will not affect the service provided. Users of UKMARC will continue to download UKMARC records from the database for seven years, or until there are no longer any users of this format, whichever is sooner. From now on any records created in MARC21 will be stored in this format although they will also be held in UKMARC. Once a conversion program is available to convert from MARC21 to UKMARC on the fly, conversion will only take place when a record is requested and all records will be stored in their original format. Over the next 2-3 years the database will gradually switch to MARC21. Further details will be posted in future Newsletters. For more information see Resource Description and Discovery Steering Group or contact Anne Mealia.

Dynamic location information
COPAC now offers, in an experimental version, access from COPAC records into the dynamic location information held on libraries’ own OPACs. As yet, not all library systems are able to offer this kind of access, but over the coming months it is expected that more libraries will be able to. It is anticipated that the service will go live at the end of November. For more information contact Anne Mealia or the COPAC helpdesk.

Staffing Resources Taskforce
The Taskforce met on 4 September. The initial area of activity is to be the organisation of the next CURL conference, aimed at all CURL staff and having as its theme continuous professional development. It is hoped that the conference will be held late June or early September 2001.
The Group is also considering possible benefits to be derived from the sharing of expertise in certain areas, especially languages.

Funding Issues Taskforce
The Taskforce met on 15 August and considered possible funding opportunities as well as areas within CURL which were likely to need funding. Any prioritisation will be driven by activities within the other Taskforces.

Teaching and Learning Taskforce
At the first two meetings of the Taskforce a considerable number of areas for further investigation were identified. A few of the key areas were:

Use of new student-centred learning methodologies and the use of recommended texts v. self-directed discovery and the implications for acquisitions programmes
The possibility of themed digitisation programmes for special collections material
Survey of trends in use of reference services
24 hour reference services

Scholarly Communications
The Taskforce met on 11 September and discussed matters relating to scholarly communications within the wider national and international context and is currently investigating closer links with SPARC. Discussions with publishers, consideration of alternative pricing models, international collaboration and lobbying on issues at higher levels are ongoing.
For more information see Scholarly Communications or contact Paul Ayris.

Resource Management
Jan Wilkinson will be chairing this group although membership has not yet been finalised but it is expected that it will be shortly. The Group will comprise a membership of eight, from CURL and the National Libraries.

For more information contact Jan Wilkinson.

Projects

Archives Hub
The posts of Project Manager and Data Editor have recently been advertised and interviews will take place in early November. For more information contact Chris Bailey.

CEDARS
JISC has awarded CURL £172,000 to extend CEDARS by a further year, to pursue a larger programme of digital preservation work as part of DNER.
Ellis Weinberger reported to the CURL members on progress with the project and his presentation will be going up on the website shortly.

For more information see the CEDARS page or contact Kelly Russell.

CURL-shares
A meeting was held at KCL on 24 October to discuss a project involving 15 CURL members using RLG SHARES as a means of interlending monographs among themselves. The project will commence on 1 November, but with some of the members joining at a later stage.
For more information contact Stephen Prowse.

HOST RSLP Project: The history of science and technology, 1801-1914: a collaborative retrospective conversion and conservation programme
Katie Sambrook reports on the progress of the HOST project, led by Kings College London :

HOST is a collaborative project funded by the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) and led by King’s College London. Nine institutions are participating in the project : King’s itself, the University of Birmingham, the Whipple Library (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge), Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, the University of Manchester, the University of Newcastle, the University of St. Andrews, University College London and the Natural History Museum. The project, which will run for two years, began in January 2000 and activity is now well underway at all HE sites.

Between them the HOST project partners hold a wealth of printed and archival material relating to the development of the non-medical sciences, both pure and applied, in the nineteenth century and the aim of the project is to open up these significant collections to scholars by a targeted programme of retrospective online cataloguing and physical conservation. The project has made an excellent start, with initial output targets exceeded by many institutions. In the second year of the project we plan to develop further the project’s dissemination strategy, which will include a HOST website.

The subjects covered by the collections that have been targeted are extremely diverse, ranging from vulcanology to railway engineering, from botany to atomic physics and from crustacea to the invention of telegraphy. Some collections relate to such scientific colossi as Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley; Imperial is cataloguing and conserving Huxley’s papers, while King’s has catalogued and conserved the former library of the zoologist Sir Gavin de Beer, a collection of over 450 works by or about Charles Darwin. Other collections reflect the growing importance of universities in the development of the applied sciences in the wake of the Industrial Revolution; large collections of printed material on industrial chemistry at Manchester (Manchester was the first UK university to establish a chair in organic chemistry) and on mining and fuel technology at Birmingham (Birmingham pioneered the university teaching of mining engineering in the UK) fall into this category.

One of the most immediately obvious benefits of a collaborative project like HOST - and there are of course many others - is the way in which we become aware not only of the existence of one another’s Special Collections but also of connections between them. Thus, King’s holds the papers of the mathematician Sir James Clerk Maxwell, while the Whipple holds books from his library, archivists at St. Andrews working on the papers of the biologist and zoologist Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson have discovered a series of letters relating to the management of the Natural History Museum during the First World War, and so on. As web-based catalogues to library and archival material become more prevalent, our ability to provide hyperlinks within individual catalogue records to guide the scholar seamlessly from one of these collections to another can play an ever more important part in increasing access to our Special Collections.

Illustration: Common meadow saffron from The cyclopaedia of useful & ornamental plants by Gilbert Thomas Burnett, revised and edited by Roderick Elphinstone. London: James Sangster and Co., [ca. 1850]. From the library of King’s College London.

Katie Sambrook
Special Collections Librarian (King’s College London) and HOST Project Manager

Diary

• Staffing Resources Taskforce 6 November in Glasgow
• Board of Directors 17 November at UCL (University College London)
• Scholarly Communications Taskforce28 November in Edinburgh
• CEDARS Conference (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/) 7 - 8 December in York
• Funding Issues Taskforce New Year 2001
• Teaching and Learning Taskforce 8 February 2001
• Resource Description and Discovery 28 February 2001 in London
• Members and AGM 27-28 March 2001 in Cambridge
• 4th CURL Annual Conference Summer 2001

Contact the curlnews editor.