The DAEDALUS project is funded under the Joint Information Systems Committee, Focus on Access to Institutional Resources Programme for three years until June 2005. The project is based at the University of Glasgow and is developing online institutional repositories for the university, while at the same time encouraging debate and discussion about scholarly communications issues and is made up of two complementary strands: advocacy and service development. This paper sets out the achievements of the project to date and details some of the advocacy strategies that have been used to engage academic staff and researchers with the aims and objectives of the project. Also discussed are some of the barriers which have been faced in obtaining content for the repositories.
IntroductionFollowing the report of libraries in UK Higher Education Institutions chaired by Sir Brian Follett, a variety of projects were set up under the eLib Programme to maximise the bene ts of the Internet to academics in a number of ways. One of the most "stable and coherent" of these has been the establishment of Internet subject gateways, which have already been described as "one of eLib's success stories". 1,2 Three of these gateways (Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL), the Organising Medical Networked Information gateway (OMNI), and the Social Science Information Gateway (SOSIG)) were investigated in order to establish the extent to which they are used by their intended recipients (the academic community) and whether they are perceived to be effective in locating quality information.The Internet as a whole is not well organised and information retrieval can often be a dif cult and frustrating process: "the sheer enormity of information available and the corresponding lack of organisation of this information can prove an effective barrier to potential users".3 Furner adds that "its size, heterogeneity and inconstancy pose particular problems for those whose concern it is to locate and retrieve precisely the information they require at a given time". 4 If access to networked information is to be an effective strategy in exploiting information technology as well as off-setting resource shortages in higher education, improvements in the way in which information is accessed on the Internet are required. Internet subject gateways are concerned both with taking advantage of the opportunities offered by the Internet, and also acting as one possible solution to the problem of information retrieval and quality control Program, vol. 33, no. 4, October 1999, pp. 327-337 Program, Vol 33 No 4, 1999 © Aslib, The Association for Information Management.All rights reserved. Except as otherwise permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher. The use and effectiveness of the eLib subject gateways: a preliminary investigation MORAG MACKIE and PAUL F. BURTON Aslib ABSTRACTInternet subject gateways were set up under the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) in order to address some of the problems of searching the Internet which have been identi ed by information professionals, i.e. locating relevant, good quality information. This preliminary study examines the extent to which academics in two universities use three eLib subject gateways (EEVL,OMNI and SOSIG). The results are generally encouraging for the eLib programme, but it is necessary for the gateways to be more effectively promoted. The study also found that academics do not have the same misgivings about the general search engines as the information professionals and seem to use them more readily than the gateways.
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