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Via:      UK.AC.MAILBASE;  5 JUL 93 16:44:50 BST
       A UK SOCIAL SCIENCE INFORMATION GATEWAY?

I am hoping to co-ordinate the setting up of a gateway
service for social science information.  I would like to
consult the social science community as widely as possible
on the structure and content of such a gateway.  If there
are services you would like to see made available, if you
have ideas on subject classification, subject trees etc.,
please contribute to this debate.  I have set up a MAILBASE
list:

sosig

to allow this to happen.

I also hope to call a small face to face meeting this summer
of a group which would become a steering or advisory group
for the service.  I would like this group to be diverse,
both in terms of discipline, experience and role within
the academic community - enthusiastic new users as welcome
as "experts".  Information and classification specialists
(e.g. librarians) particularly welcome.

If you are interested please read on.

When I visit and talk to social scientists in workshops
and personal discussions, three concerns are often voiced:


*******

"This networking stuff is all very well but is there anything out there
that's really useful for ME?"

*******

"Even though I know there's useful information out there, the task of finding
it seems so daunting and complex for a technically illiterate person like me
- I don't even start."

*******

"What I really need is XYZ.  Can't you get that put on_line somewhere? "

*******


One way of answering these concerns is to provide a focal
point for relevant information for the social science community.


The existence of such a facility would make it easier for
trainers and "animateurs", to point people to the right
place to look.  Similar facilities for social scientists
exist in other parts of the world, but not at present in
the UK.  Such a facility would not only allow a centralised
means of access to existing publicly available on_line
information, but it would also encourage new information
to be made available.

The sheer volume of relevant information available on the
international networks means that attempting to reproduce
that information in the UK  would be futile and expensive.

What is needed is a gateway service, a sort of shopping
mall or arcade for social science information, with menu
items which automatically connect users to distant information
resources.  Menu items would connect directly to a wide
variety of national and international services, archives,
databases, libraries and information servers of particular
relevance to social scientists.

The ability to store information only once but point to
it several times from a number of different places, or
menus, has far reaching implications.  It means that resources
can be classified in more than one way to make them usable,
findable, reachable by a wide variety of users.

Resources could be made available as menu items from a
social science gateway, possibly under subject headings
such as Economics, Geography etc.

They could also be arranged on the basis of geographic
location - Resources in the USA, Resources in Australia
etc.

And in other ways.........

The same item (for example data from the United Nations)
could be made available from many different sections e.g.

     World data
     Geography
     Economics
     Politics
     Development
     Resources in the USA
etc. etc.

The existence of this gateway will hopefully lead to the
creation of a  UK Social Science Bulletin Board and will
improve network access both for information users and information
providers.

Social scientists, especially those not yet experienced
in the use of international computer networks, will be
able to utilise world-wide resources without complex individual
service instructions.  And access to UK resources will
be opened up to a large number of potential new users.



If you would like to join the Mailbase discussion list
to keep up with developments please send the following
message to   mailbase@uk.ac.mailbase

join sosig firstname lastname

****remember to REPLACE firstname lastname with your names****

If you would like to contribute to the debate by e-mail
please send your contribution to:

sosig@uk.ac.mailbase

It will be distributed to all the members of the list.