My email on dissemination has produced some useful suggestions. Since some
of these have been private emails, I thought I might try to re-write the
original incorporating what I can easily manage. If you think your good
idea has been left out, please respond to me with suggested re-wording.
Any general coments or discussion, please copy to the list, so others can
join in. WARNING: Now LONG!

Introduction
============

As we move through the middle phase of the eLib programme, we have to
start thinking more and more about dissemination. In many ways, the whole
point of the eLib programme is wasted if we do not have effective
dissemination. But none of us are yet certain how this should best be
done.

What and who for?
=================

We need to get clear what we mean by dissemination, and who it is aimed
at. I don't mean publicity or public relations material; this is not about
hype the feel-good factor or getting our grants renewed. Since we have 60
projects spending HE's money to create a great deal of learning, we need
to make sure that learning stays in the community and is known about and
exploited (insofar as it is any good) by the community after the projects
end and the staff move on to other things.

Tom Wilson points out, with a couple of references to reports: "Our work
demonstrated that dissemination must be multi-modal and my experience of
other projects is that paper dissemination is perhaps the least useful
means of reaching practitioners.  Training workshops are perhaps the most
useful, but MUST be keyed to genuine practitioner concerns, rather than
simply seeking to inform.  The consequence of this is that different types
of projects will need different modes of dissemination - in fact, I prefer
the word 'diffusion' because it has connotations of a rather more
proactive kind of activity than dissemination." I think these are useful
comments.

The primary community in eLib's case is UK HE; this is the community which
pays for the programme and at whom it is mainly aimed. Other communities
can benefit from the dissemination process, but generally this is a
secondary result. An exception might be the publisher community (there may
be other exceptions); it is presumably in our interests for the ideas
generated to be taken up by publishers.

Paula Kingston writes: "I think it's important to identify the aims and
objectives of the dissemination, and the particular audiences at whom the
information is targetted. If we identify these, we can determine who needs
to know what, by what means, more easily. For example, dissemination to
libraries might best be done by joint workshops - I think this is a good
idea,- but dissemination to academic staff in particular subject areas
might best be done through their subject associations' conferences or
publications." 

So we should be clear that different audiences merit different approaches. 

Paula goes on: "Perhaps most importantly, how do we get to Vice-
chancellors - what do they read and what conferences do they attend?  If
we want to embed some of the eLib projects, this seems a crucial target."

Leaving aside the practical question asked, it is clear we need to get the
message to V-Cs, but is this dissemination or PR? Perhaps it is mostly the
latter, but becomes dissemination as it impinges on information strategies
and other strategic issues which our V-Cs are thinking about. But the
"strategic implications of networked learner support" to take one example,
are quite different from the "how of networked learner support".

Andrew Green from Swansea suggests: "It might be instructive to look at
the question from the other side of the equation, from the point of view
of the 'disseminatee'.  We in Swansea have given some thought very
recently to the best way of informing ourselves about eLib in a more
systematic way than up to now.  Our approach will be to assign the
different programme areas to specific (relevant) staff (more than one in
some cases), whose job will be to monitor developments in the appropriate
projects, keep up to date, inform Library staff of relevant info
(informally and via formal staff training & development sessions), and
recommend action."

How could we best support such activities inside institutions?

Stakeholders
============

Stakeholders as far as dissemination are concerned, therefore, include

	Library staff
	Computing staff
	Academics
	Library school students
	V-Cs
	Publishers
	Rest Of The World (ROTW tm)

Activities
==========

We have some practical pointers. On Demand Publishing in the Humanities,
for instance, is running a series of workshops around the country. It's a
good model for a project which finishes early, but I'm sure we don't want
60 workshop series crammed into the last few months of eLib.

Obvious activities which could lead to dissemination include:

a) focus groups
b) pilot services
c) training
c1) library school activities
d) awareness articles (eg Ariadne, D-Lib, LA Record etc)
d1) targeted email list use (new or existing lists)
d2) distribution of CDs in target communities
d3) revamping eLib web pages to be more 'product-oriented'
e) reports of various kinds (in print and/or on the web)
f) workshops
g) conferences
h) roadshows

Working together
================

I believe that groups of like projects (perhaps but not exclusively linked
to programme areas) should start to devise joint dissemination plans. So
for example, a conference or workshop on electronic journals might be more
useful than several competing ones on individual projects. It might get
even more generalised to electronic publishing, including other programme
areas as well. We might call these agglomerations 'programme super-areas'. 

One thing to avoid in joint activities would be the succession of talking
heads saying the same thing about each project. It would be better, I
think for it to be more cooperatively planned, so project x does
copyright, y does presentation in HTML, z does presentation in PDF etc (or
whatever division is most appropriate).

If conferences/workshops on a project basis are 'vertical', these area or
super-area conferences could be 'broadly vertical' (!). Some have
suggested 'horizontal' workshops or perhaps roadshows, where a selection
of projects from most programme areas are demonstrated. 

John Kirriemuir, supporting this horizontal idea, writes: "Basically,
workshops that cover *all* areas of the programme at the same time, such 
as:
* a few subject gateways (sosig, omni, adam)
* play with a document delivery system 
* explore an electronic journal or two (jilt, soc res online)
* do a sample, scaled down, training package (netskills?)
* use a grey literature/pre-print archive
* explore some digitised material

"...would be very useful, as:
* people see the electronic library more as a whole, and less as just a
few parts in isolation
* strategic influencers (fund holders, librarians, computer centre people,
subject librarians) may be more swayed by a holistic demonstration, rather
than just having a day of projects in the same area (as someone said,
'when you've heard one, you've heard them all, only with different
acronyms').

"To use a cliche, eLib as a whole is probably (hopefully?) greater than
the sum of its parts. I feel very strongly that something like this
(across the entire programme) needs to be done; it would be seen as
drawing the strings of the whole programme together (and it would be
interesting to see how eLib looked when you fitted various parts together
in one bundle)." 

One project which has done some quite sophisticated work with discussion
lists which might be adapted towards dissemination is NetLinkS, with the
nls-forum mailbase list. This uses a series of 3-week discussion periods
on topics generated by a 'celebrity speaker'. It gets participation from
all over the world and has seen some very interesting traffic with a
direct bearing on their topic. So they get to learn as well as
disseminate. 

This may be the sort of thing Dennis Nicholson had in mind:  "is it not
possible you/we would reach far more people, and stand a better chance of
getting the right amount of information to the right people more
efficiently and effectively through the creative use of e-mail? I'm
thinking in terms of a series of lists on key topics eg
lis-elib-copyright, lis-elib-z39.50 and so on. People would join the lists
they were interested in and projects would send information as and when
they had something to share to an appropriate subset of the lists. I'm
sure the community would appreciate a service of this kind.  One danger of
course would be that projects might not use the lists, but it could work
in theory (I think). I don't know if you have any money, but maybe a eLib
project which aimed to continuously push projects for appropriate updates
for the various list is worth considering?" 

Planning
========

Dissemination is going to involve planning. I would like suggestions on
how we can facilitate that planning. 

Two suggestions made so far include running concertation days in each
programme area (or perhaps super-area) specifically to address
dissemination. Less expensively, we might produce a list of major events
and conferences and use email to discuss where and how projects might
present.

We have had some suggestions; coincidentally LibTech are asking whether
eLib would like to run some more events this year as we did last time, and
separately a project has offered to coordinate a training & awareness
event.



-- 
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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