Dear Collegaues,

Please find below a report of a meeting held on 29th October to
establish a User Group for the Education Indexes.

An important feature of the group will be the three way relationship
between the users, the publishers of the indexes, and the providers of
the platforms, as far as this is possible. This means that the group is
open to all subscibers to BEI whether or not they subscribe through the
JISC contract. It also means that we shall be approaching other
providers to see how they would like to be involved.

The first open meeting of the User Group will be held in Manchester on
30th March 2004, following the LISE Conference. Further details will be
circulated nearer the time.

In the mean time I will be setting up a mailing list which
can be used for constructive comment and discussion.

Please see the notes of the meeting for further details.

Regards

Judith

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Judith Stewart
Email: [log in to unmask]
Bolland Library,
University of the West of England
Coldharbour Lane
Bristol BS16 1QY
Education Index User Group

Report of the inaugural meeting, held at the Orchard LRC, University of
Birmingham, 29th October 2003.

1. Present: Simon Jones, Gavin Coney (Dialog), Phil Sheffield (BEI),
Mark Norman (NFER), Judith Stewart (LISE), and Andy Welsman, (University
of London, Institute of Education).

2. The purpose of this first meeting was to
*       Agree the remit of the group.
*       Discuss the frequency, format and location of future meetings.
*       Agree how communications will take place among group members.

3. The remit of the group was agreed :

The purpose of  the Education databases User group is to provide a forum
for discussion and dialogue between the publishers of the Index, its
users, and the providers of the platforms on which it operates. 

It will:
q       provide a forum for users' experience and views from a range of
Libraries, Information Units, research and professional environments.

q       enable the discussion of developments in the content and
functionality of the Index.

q       provide a forum for the managers of BEI to communicate
information about general service developments. 

q       facilitate communication between users and the platform
providers with regard to technical and functional developments

q       enable the sharing of good practice in end user training.


4.  It was agreed that while future "meetings" of the group might be
virtual, using audio conferencing and web-ex (web based demonstrations),
it was important that the first open meeting should be a physical
meeting. After discussion of various options, it was agreed that this
should take place after the LISE Conference in Manchester on 30th March
2004. Future possible locations could be the Dialog offices at London
Bridge, and Leeds University. The frequency of meetings might be guided
by technical or content developments, but should be at least one per
year.

5.   The value of promoting the user Group at one or more of the major
online/Library     technology exhibitions was discussed.

6. It was agreed that a Jiscmail list should be established for the
group, and all interested individuals and organisations encouraged to
join. Judith Stewart would be the list owner in the first instance.
There was a debate about the advantages and disadvantages of an open or
closed list. There is a middle solution of having an open list with a
password protected linked service giving online help to JISC
subscribers. The details of this will be worked out with Gavin Coney in
the next few weeks.

7.      A message will be sent out to members of existing lists with
information about the     first full meeting, the mailing list and the
customer support website.

8.      Summary of recent responses from Dialog :

*       Gavin emphasised the company's willingness to listen to and
communicate with users, although they clearly were not able to promise
all the developments that might be requested.

*       The facility to save searches will be introduced at the end of
November. Developers are looking at performance issues, particularly in
relation to some system bugs. There is a well defined process for the
analysis of bugs and to decide what can be remedied at the next upgrade.

*       Dialog are working on developing the e-journal links software to
cope with the greatly increased number of hits from the Education
databases. The new version of the software is 10x faster, and the remote
links have been moved to a bigger server.

*       There has in the past been a message to indicate whether or not
a link to a document is available. It was removed at users' request.
Gavin noted the feeling among the new community of users that this
should be reconsidered.

*       Each database can be be improved individually, and changes to
the interface are not difficult as they are located in the database,
they are not generic.

*       The display of "Bibliographic record" as the default is generic
to Dialog databases, because of the number of full text  databases, and
the implication of having these displaying for large numbers of
citations.

*       Users are asked to pass back experiences of slow operation to
Gavin, remembering the possibility that local servers could be
responsible.

*       Users will be able to make collective requests for changes to
buttons etc through the user group.

*       The name of the dataset on the Athens listing is now "Dialog
education". This was requested by some users. What is the view of this
from new users?



Judith Stewart
November 5th 2003