Jon Knight wrote (amongst other things):

> * I'm somewhat surprised that the issue of dissemination has come up this
> late in the day; I would have thought it is something that most projects
> have been doing for ages. 

While it's true that some have been disseminating in a major way, and all
have been disseminating to some extent, I think we have to realise there's
only about one year left to get all our lessons learned (by ourselves) and
disseminated into the community. I wanted to raise the profile of the
issue, since a considerable amount of forward planning is needed for some
of the activities envisaged.

> * The value of project mailing list archives shouldn't be underestimated. 

Unfortunately mailbase archives are removed after one year. We have been
taking copies of lis-elib-managers and lis-elib archive files month by
month as the come up for deletion, but we have not yet worked out how to
create an archive somewhere else which seamlessly links into the mailbase
archive for the very latest messages.

> * I noticed that the eLib working papers and reports at
> <URL:http://ukoln.ac.uk/elib/wk_papers/> were a bit thin on the ground; 
> maybe we should all write a technical report or two to describe some
> element of our projects and whether we think that we did was the right way
> to do it, what we'd do if we were starting again now, etc, etc. 

Reports should be in the picture, and should probably go on the project
server in the short term, perhaps linked from the eLib pages as John
Kirriemuir suggests. However, this itself raises the issue of the
longevity of their URLs. How soon after an eLib project ends will the host
university pull the plug on the web server? We can have a strategy to move
all the reports to a central place, but then the URL changes. Perhaps we
should ask for all reports to be advertised not by URLs but by Persistent
URLs (PURLs, see http://purl.oclc.org/). Mind you, we'd need a UK PURL
service first.

> * Another good way of disseminating results is getting people using your
> tools and/or models for their own services.  Of course this has to be
> weighed against nasty exit strategies (there, I've said that favourite "e
> phrase" :-) ) that some project might have that assume commercial
> exploitation of results/software/whatever after eLib.  If you can
> give your code/model/results/whatever away, then that's likely to
> encourage libraries and computer centres to use them (we all know how cash
> strapped most institutions are after all).

Just to point out that eLib projects _have_ to make their products
available to UK HE, at no or very little cost. And I think this is
certainly a good way of disseminating at one level. So perhaps I should
add marketing products to my list. 

-- 
Chris Rusbridge

Programme Director, Electronic Libraries Programme
The Library, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
Phone 01203 524979	Fax 01203 524981
Email [log in to unmask]


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