Muddy waters

There are currently many factors of relevance to the future of subject gateways; this is, indeed, an interesting time to be involved in this field. These factors include:

1. The David Haynes Associates study, commissioned by the CEI, into future scenarios for funding the ANR services (otherwise known as the eLib subject gateways). The report is due to be presented to the CEI in the next month or so, so by late spring or early summer we will have a better idea of what CEI/JISC proposes for their clutch of gateways.

2. The development of the DNER - the Distributed National Electronic Resource.

3. Technical developments at both the browser level (Netscape v5, of which the source code has been released, has some interesting enhanced bookmark-handling facilities) and at the protocol and data exchange levels (for example, developments with RDF)

4. eLib phase three - this consists of several large projects, which include five "Hybrid Libraries" projects. Some of these overlap in terms of content provision, and mechanism for content provision, with some of the subject gateways (it is notable that two each of the Hybrids are interested in combinations of History, Social Sciences, Health and Medicine and the Arts - which happen to be the areas covered by four of the ANR subject gateways).

5. Charges for the use of the transatlantic links, as outlined in JISC Circular 3/98. This is interesting, as Universities will be looking to cut down practises such as e.g. browsing US sites. From a subject gateway point of view, the implications of this is that using a gateway in your own country to locate the resources you want, rather than flail around in a large overseas search engine (usually unsuccessfully due to the lack of content quality control), is a lot cheaper under the charging mechanism outlined in the circular.

   What will also be interesting is how Universities cope with this charging. Some are already doing cost analysis and projections; others are setting up pre-committee committees :-) Others are not actively doing anything, or (in terms of the key motivating people) not aware of the situation - and will be in for a big surprise when a large bill arrives from the academic network service providers! (Thought: who will the cost be devolved to - the University central, computing services, individual departments, the library, or will students end up paying for their own timed Web access?).

6. The emergence of other gateways; every few days, we hear of either a new subject gateway with some kind of quality control somewhere else in the world, or plans to build such a gateway. Unfortunately, there is no global, or even regional, co-ordination or cross-awareness, which means that some subject areas e.g. agriculture, are covered by several subject-based gateways while others are covered by one or non.

Partially because of this, the ROADS newsletter, rather than just focus on ROADS-based gateways, will also contain material written by non-ROADS based gateways, or other people associated or working in the field of subject gateway (or quality gateway - not every Information Gateway is subject-based) development. Details of what's in this issue can be found in the section marked, unsurprisingly, "What's in this issue".

As ever: if you have an enquiry about ROADS, then send it to ROADS liaison, at: roads-liaison@bristol.ac.uk

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