University Oxford Blog

Nowadays information technologies become more and more popular and develop with each year. It refers also to the educational sphere. As a result of such development, University of Oxford initiated in 1998 study program which lasted nine months and involves digitization activities of past, present and future. This study program became well known as ‘Scoping Study’ and was completed by July of 1999. In this article main result of the study program is described.

The main aim of the program was to digitalize the library services of the University. In the result the investigators assembled and organized all library items and the next stage was to create and to present the further development plan with such main objectives as: remaining the projects into services and proactive and reactive digitalization. Created service had to embrace all aspects of digital library such as data management, conversion, administration, management, etc. But it was quite complicated task, as the majority of the existing systems could not collaborate with new digitalizing services. Oxford Digital Library Service appeared as a result. This project included advice, dissemination of practice, consultancy concerning the digitalization. ODLS collaborated with proactive and reactive digitalization projects with the aim to provide digital materials in the teaching process and researches of the university. First of all it refers to the library services, as it made less complicated the process of management, cataloguing, administration of the library items.

Besides, all recommendation which were created as a result of investigation was presented in the official report which was published on the official website of the program. In several years the investigations were continued with the main objective to fill in the gaps of the first study and to create new projects. There appeared development team which works on the planning of the projects and will make final conclusions in several months.