May I first say, a Happy New Year to you all, this message is an 
announcement with regard to the UnityWeb service which will be evolving 
over the coming weeks and months.  Please read on if you are interested in 
nationwide and regional initiatives around resource discovery and sharing.

As we embark on 2006, Talis, a software provider with over 30 years 
experience in delivering solutions to enable resource discovery and 
resource sharing, will be relaunching the UnityWeb service (under a new 
name) in May 2006.  What does this mean?  It means that we aim to provide 
the best possible solution, freely chosen by the majority of libraries and 
100% focussed on the UK resource discovery, sharing and interlending 
community. Importantly this embraces all libraries in the UK, irrespective 
of affiliation.

With our sights firmly fixed on investing and expanding in this area, we 
want to share these ideas with you, via a series of regional roadshow 
events (see below).  This gives you an important opportunity to review 
your current resource sharing provision in light of the changes that are 
taking place.

At these events, we will be showcasing our new demonstrator (Whisper), 
which will offer a preview of what libraries might be able to expect from 
future resource sharing systems, and of course we want to validate these 
ideas directly with you.

The meetings will start at 11am, lunch will be provided, and we will 
finish by 2.30pm.  There will be no charge for attending. The dates and 
locations are:

Mo 23rd Jan                 Derby

Tu 24th Jan                 Wrexham

Mo 30th Jan                 Exeter

Tu 31st Jan                  Southampton

We 1st Feb                  Guildford

Tu 7th Feb                    Newcastle

We 8th Feb                  Norwich

Th 9th Feb                    Leeds

Mo 13th Feb                 Dublin

We 15th Feb                Stirling

Please contact Samantha Nock (mailto:[log in to unmask]) to secure a 
place.  If you are interested in attending, and would like to suggest 
alternative locations more convenient to yourself and other interested 
parties, please feel free to contact us with your suggestion, as we maybe 
adding dates as appropriate.

As an organisation, Talis is focussed on openness, transparency, value, 
excellence and the role of community in the library domain. In this 
application area with many 100s of libraries, we continue to believe that 
a physical union catalogue is a far superior solution to a virtual 
catalogue powered by federated search technology. We also have the 
following guiding principles:

That contributing your holdings data to a union catalogue should be FREE 
and that the data itself remains the property of the library. 

That processing of data contributions should be standardised and your 
library should be easily able to contribute to multiple catalogues without 
complex and chargeable 'extract and upload' software from your LMS 
provider. 

That expensive and discrete development of union catalogues, reliant on 
project funding, is not the way to enable discovery in the future.   

That every library in the UK should be able to join such a service with 
minimal cost and effort for the benefit of every librarian, citizen and 
student. 

That simple discovery of holdings should be FREE for anyone to access. 
That the ability to locate library holdings should be available from sites 
such as Google, Amazon, and eBay and specific sites like the research 
focussed COPAC or RedLightGreen service. 
 
If you agree, or would like to debate these principles, then please come 
and talk to us at the roadshows.  We are developing the underlying next 
generation software platform to achieve this and have been discussing 
these possibilities with third parties and our LMS competitors for some 
time. Some of you will have attended our Talis Research Days where these 
topics were vigorously debated. 

We look forward to seeing you at one of the regional events.

Fiona Leslie