lis-elib readers might be interested to hear a little background to
last week's news on the Higher Education front.
Following fairly lengthy discussions, the National Committee of
Inquiry into Higher Education chaired by Sir Ron Dearing decided
that Education-line was the appropriate location to disseminate and
archive electronic versions of the documents produced by (and for)
the Committee. With only a few days to manage the equivalent of 1700
pages of text, we were able to make the (ready-made) website visible
from soon after one o'clock on the day of issue (Wednesday 23rd July)
and to offer search facilities on the following day. The search
facilities are still being developed as the documents are assimilated
into the Education-line database itself. At present the standard
index, query and thesaurus options (operating at Chapter, Appendix
and separate Report level) are being supplemented by a free text
search of the whole web site. These are accessible from within the
NCIHE site from their own Help/Search option in the navigation bar.
If you haven't already visited the site, the address is:
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/ncihe
(you will need to use Netscape 2 or Internet Explorer 3 - or above - to
cope with the imagemaps that were an integral part of the site's
design)
An estimated 16,000 internet visitors, representing more than 50
countries worldwide were attracted to the NCIHE web site in the first
two and a half days of its availability. 300,000 separate files were
downloaded between 1.00 pm and midnight on the 23rd July, the day of
its release. This week is adding 2000+ per day to the list of
visitors. Access seems to have been quick enough to suit most users
- our thanks and admiration go out to the team in Leeds University
Computing Service, and to Damon Querry at Newcastle who provided an
extra mirror site at very short notice. Many others worked hard on
design and html fronts.
Sam Saunders
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Education-Line
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol
Brotherton Library
University of Leeds,
Leeds LS2 9JT
0113 233 5525 (Fax 0113 233 5524)
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