Hello!

As a former Systems Developer for the RDN I'd probably be the first to
say go for the RDN... :-)

That said, you are right, other organisations often wondered about
whether they should replace their own site listings with those of the
RDN and I've been to meetings where we tried to suggest using the RDN
would be a good thing, but also that the RDN should augment, rather than
replace local listings (for reasons you know - local lists may contain
resources *not* in the RDN and, perhaps, not meeting the RDN's selection
criteria.

Many people used ROADS (including the RDN) to provide the services you
mention and if it still works for you, then why replace it? Old isn't
always bad and you probably will have found all the bugs by now! :-)

The IMESH project at UKOLN reviewed (some time ago) products that could
be used to create Web 'gateways' like those provided by ROADS and you
may want to visit the site:

  http://www.imesh.org/toolkit/work/tech_review/products/

and the report mentioned on that page from the Renardus project

  http://www.renardus.org/about_us/deliverables/d1_1/D1_1_final.pdf

lists some software that would probably do the job too... (The link on
the IMESH page is broken...)

Like I said though - these 'reviews' are from around the time of ROADS
and, while a useful start, probably a bit out of date...

A quick look at sourceforge reveals the following:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/webbiblio/

"WebBiblio is an open source software to manage bibliographic data of
information resources available on internet."

and

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/potnia/

"Potnia is a subject gateway software, developed for scientific
directories, including journals, papers, bibliographic databases,
research webs and so on. Database structure is compliant to Dublin Core
Metadata Set"

which may meet your needs. And there are other open source things
around, for example:

  http://www.greenstone.org/
  (though this may be a little heavy weight for managing links... :-))

and you can get some more like it from:

  http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=related:www.greenstone.org/

There are simple solutions like a static Web page that lists your
"local" resources (though that can be hard to maintain) coupled with
RDN-Include at the top or something like that - see:

  http://www.rdn.ac.uk/rdn-i/

(I wrote that so I know it is good! :-))

Many of the RDN Subject Gateways invested time in building their own
interfaces to managing internet resources, using various tools - perhaps
the most common being PHP and MySQL. With a little programming effort
you could develop one in house with these tools - which has the
advantage of being "yours"...

I hope at least a little bit of this is useful to you - it was a nice
stroll down memory lane for me! :-)

Pete Cliff
Library Systems Analyst
University of Bristol