ADAM Team
ADAM Partners
ADAM Library
Technical Information

ADAM, the Art, Design, Architecture & Media Information Gateway, is a service being developed to help you find useful, quality-assured information on the Internet in the following subject areas:

• Fine Art, including painting, prints and drawings, sculpture and other contemporary media and practices, including fine art using technology and performance art
• Design, including industrial, product, fashion, graphic, packaging and interior design
• Architecture, including town planning and landscape design, but excluding building construction
• Applied Arts, including textiles, ceramics, glass, metals, jewellery and furniture
• Media, including film, television, broadcasting, photography and animation
• Theory; relevant historical, philosophical and contextual studies
• Museum studies and conservation
• Professional Practice related to any of the above

ADAM helps you find the relevant information by providing a searchable on-line catalogue describing Internet resources such as web sites or electronic mailing lists, in much the same way as a library catalogue describes bibliographic resources such as books and journals.

In this way, a 'virtual library' of digital art, design, architecture and media resources can be created to benefit the UK Higher Education community.

The records in the ADAM catalogue are created by a team of professional librarians, who locate resources according to our Collections Policy, evaluate their quality against our Selection Guidelines and then use the traditional tools and skills of librarianship (such as cataloguing rules for keyword indexing, classification and controlled terminology) to create a detailed description for any resources that:

• are relevant to ADAM's subject scope
• are accurate
• are authoritative
• are reasonably current
• contain a significant amount of unique information

Catalogued resources are regularly checked to ensure that they are still accessible, and that they are still of a sufficiently high quality.

Standards

Acknowledged standards are being applied wherever possible in the development of the service, to help protect the investment of time and resources against premature obsolescence:

• Cataloguing: Cataloguing Rules based on the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rule (2nd Edition) and Nancy Olsen's 'Guide to Cataloguing Networked Resources'
• Terminology: the Art & Architecture Thesaurus
• Classification: Dewey Decimal System (21st Edition)
• Resource Description: IAFA Templates, Dublin Core Metadata Element Set
• Technical: HTML 3.2, WHOIS++, Z39.50

Further details about the proposed service can be found in the evolving ADAM Specification Framework documentation.

Helping us to help you

Our aim is to produce a service that best meets the needs of the relevant academic communities. In order to accomplish this, we are conducting a continuous consultation and evaluation process so that we can focus our efforts on the areas of most importance to the community.

Although we use a number of methods in the evaluation of ADAM (for example focus group discussions, user surveys, user testing, and automatically-generated service usage statistics), the easiest way for you to help us is to use the service and let us know what you think using the feedback form.

Evaluation Results

We intend to make the results of our evaluation activities public wherever possible; currently available are:

• Results of 1996 ADAM Survey of User Information Needs & Search Methods
• ADAM 1996 Annual Report (abridged)
• ADAM 1997 Annual Report (abridged)
• Service Usage Statistics

A Note for Information Providers

If you have any networked information that maybe of interest to ADAM's user community, there are a two ways that you can help us to help others find your resources:

• Notify us of your resource using the Resource Nomination form
• Embed metadata in your web pages

Embedding descriptive 'metadata' (data about data) in your resources helps to ensure that we have enough information to create a sufficiently-detailed catalogue record, which in turn helps ADAM's users to find the information they need quickly and easily.

Keeping in touch

You can find out more about ADAM, or help us to create a service that is as useful as possible, in a number of ways:

• E-mail, write, fax or 'phone individual members of the Project Team
• E-mail the whole project team
• Complete our on-line feedback form
• Subscribe to our electronic mailing list adam-news

Collaboration

ADAM is committed to collaborating with other relevant initiatives, to help promote and develop standards that make information on the Internet easier to find, and has already forged a number of significant strategic partnerships:

• Pavilion Group: The Pavilion Group consists of an informal collective of projects and initiatives whose broad aims are to support and enhance teaching and learning in art and design in Higher Education through the application of information technology. The current members are ADAM, CTI Art & Design, DeLiberations on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, ECSTASY, GLADNet, NVRCAD, and VADS.
• Visual Arts Data Service: The VADS, one of the 5 service providers of the Art & Humanities Data Service (AHDS), is ADAM's sister project, and is directed and managed by the same personnel.
• Access to Network Resources: ADAM is one of 10 ANR projects within the Electronic Libraries Programme.
• UK Office for Library and Information Networking: ADAM is participating in two UKOLN initiatives, ZEXI & MODELS.
• Technical Advisory Service for Images, a JISC-funded service.
• Knowledge Gallery, a Smart Isles and Private Finance Initiative development project with part-funding from JISC.
• On-line Computer Library Center: ADAM is actively participating in the development of the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, an initiative managed by OCLC.

ADAM's organisation

The development of ADAM is directed by a Steering Group made up of representatives from the ADAM Consortium Partners, who successfully applied for funding from the Electronic Libraries Programme (or eLib for short) to create the service over a 3-year period. The project's current funding is until December 1st 1998.

The day-to-day development and operation of the ADAM service is carried out by the ADAM Team, who are based at four of the Consortium Partners' institutions.

The Electronic Libraries Programme is a £15m initiative of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils, which was set up as a result of the findings of the Joint Funding Councils Libraries Review Group, detailed in a document universally-known as the Follett Report.