UK higher and further education is in the process of building a body of high
quality electronic content which will be available through an open, interoperable web-based environment. The Distributed National
Electronic Resource (DNER) is a partnership between higher education authorities, universities, colleges and & commercial
information vendors (publishers and aggregators) to deliver an extensive menu of electronic resources for learning and research to
6M students and staff in the sector.
This ground breaking project has had to tackle many of the issues on the current information agenda. These include the negotiating
for and licensing of content for this vast audience, the provision of portals and 'fusion services' through which this material can
be accessed and integrated, and the support of users distributed through 800 institutions, including virtual training materials and
helpdesks. What open standards do we insist that commercial products and systems fulfil? What has been the reaction of users to this
content and access architecture? The answer is not necessarily what had been planned or hoped. Some of the painful lessons of the
project will be analysed. These are important both for those managing and delivering electronic services and to information vendors.
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Author information:
Allan Foster is Director of Information Services (and University Librarian) at Keele University. He was
previously at Manchester Business School (1988-94), Lancashire Polytechnic, Sheffield City Polytechnic and the British Institute
of Management.
His main areas of interest include strategic information planning, the use of networked information, electronic database
provision, business information and information/knowledge management. He is a frequent speaker at conferences, seminars and
professional meetings nationally and internationally, and he has written many books, reports and journal articles on these
subjects.
He has been a consultant to a number of companies and public sector organisations in the UK, mainland Europe, Asia and South
America, and has been an external examiner at four UK universities. He has a degree in social sciences, is an Associate of the
Library Association and a Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists.
He has been a member of, and chaired, various professional committees, advisory boards and user groups in recent years. Most
recently he was a member of JISC's Committee for Electronic Information and Chair of its Content Working Group. He is joint
chair of the
Publishers & Librarians Solutions Group (PALS, a partnership between the Publishers Association, the Association of Learned
Society Publishers & JISC) and chair of the DNER Discovery Tools Working Group. |
