98HigherEducation

Higher Education Libraries: Current Issues

Derek G. Law

Introduction

Higher Education in the United Kingdom is funded principally by the state. It allocates funds at arm’s length through three funding councils, one each for England, Scotland and Wales, and through DENI, the Department of Education for Northern Ireland. Funds are allocated to universities in a largely formulaic way, partly dependent on student numbers and subject mix, and partly in relation to the quality of research. This money is passed to universities as the so-called block grant and universities may then subdivide and allocate it as they see fit. There are many models for funding university libraries, but these are chosen at institutional rather than central level. The number and nature of university students are changing. The number and proportion of women students, mature students and part-time students have all increased. In addition, most universities are seeking to increase the number of non-European Community based overseas students, since they bring more substantial fees. The modularization of courses, along with growing student poverty due to the erosion of student grant levels by inflation, are also slowly, if apparently inevitably, leading to a desire on the part of many students to move in and out of the university system, gaining course units over a number of years as their financial situation permits. Where a national UK dimension exists, the funding councils have set up joint sub-committees to deal with particular issues. One such is the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) which is responsible for the provision of the national academic network, JANET, and for the services and content provided across it. As will be demonstrated below, JISC and its various sub-committees have been instrumental in the attempt to transform traditional academic libraries into some of the most advanced information services in the developed world.

Higher education libraries are undergoing perhaps their most turbulent but most invigorating period for a century. Unprecedented levels of funding are being made available at national level to develop what JISC has defined as the Distributed National Electronic Resource, at a time when individual libraries and their institutions face acute financial pressure. Student numbers have been rising while the resource available to each student continues to fall; libraries have lost none of their old costs but must find ways to fund new electronic developments; libraries are being encouraged to take over new roles in support of student learning; library staff are under enormous pressure to deliver the old while training for and adapting to the new. Institutions themselves expect a shift from teaching to learning using ‘self-paced discovery’ and other euphemisms for reducing face-to-face teaching under the twin pressures of increased teaching load and demands for more and more research.

While this vigour is being displayed in libraries, there is an element of stasis in the system as a whole, as it awaits the outcome of the Dearing Report, due in the summer of 1997. Sir Ron Dearing and his group are charged with many things, but principally will review funding mechanisms for higher education. Both major political parties are committed to its outcomes, since both appear to recognize that the system must change.

Although marking time to some extent, universities continue to plan for the future. What universities want is described in a recent review of their strategic plans (HEFCE, 1996):

…over two thirds of institutions particularly among former

Polytechnics¹ and general colleges, described their increasing

emphasis on student-centred, resource-based learning. Discussion

covered developing and implementing information strategies;

developing learning resource centres; extending IT facilities,

including in student residences; remote access to computer

networks, including at associate colleges; exploiting JANET,

SuperJANET and the World Wide Web; and using CD-ROM,

multimedia and computer-aided learning materials. Over a

quarter of institutions stated that they were looking to

incorporate the outcomes of TLTP [Teaching and Learning

Technology Programme] projects in their courseware.

Clearly such ambitions have major implications for the academic services of these institutions. It would be comforting but implausible to suppose that institutions had considered those implications in any serious way.

Converged services and information strategies

As a result of the Follett Report (HEFCE, 1993a) (described in detail below), all universities have had to create information strategies for submission to the funding councils. Although most institutions have developed a strategy at some level, the funding councils have created a small pilot programme in which a fairly formal structure is being piloted in six universities of various types. This attempts to offer a toolbox approach and to ensure that the right questions are asked, rather than requiring that a prescriptive set of answers be given. Librarians watch this with perhaps a little trepidation, since it seems at least as likely to produce another layer of annual bureaucracy as a tool which will truly improve organizational management. This process has led to some of the expectations reflected in the review of strategic plans, but has also led to fresh thinking on how student-centred learning is to be delivered. In many cases this has led to a bringing together of academic support services in a single management structure to create so-called ‘converged services’.

Convergence is probably the most dramatic change in library management structures of the last few years. Although often seen as a recommendation of the Follett Report, it is not. Follett recommended only that structures be considered, without in any way prescribing the outcome. Over fifty institutions have now opted to have a single individual running library and computing services, typically with a title such as Director of Information Services. Institutions across the spectrum have followed this route, from Aberdeen to Westminster, and have created a single service with library and computing at the core, but often with an additional set of departments ranging from learning resources to telephones, from the Chapel to Administrative Computing. In some 85% of cases it is the former librarian who has been given charge of the combined service. Some of the interest in this model, which will repay further study, is that its sheer scale is a peculiarly British development rather than, as so often, one which mimics North American practice. These services are not being changed as a form of structural tidying-up, but with an ambition to create change.² At the core of this development lies an ambition to transform the learning experience.

Teaching and learning

Most institutions are beginning to experiment to a greater or lesser extent with computer-assisted learning of various sorts. Although the drive for this often comes from an information services or learning resources division, which includes the library. The commitment of the funding councils to promoting the creation of networkable teaching materials has been evident through funded programmes. The development of monitoring and assessment of teaching quality has also affected information services.

It is certainly the case that the arrival of TQA (Teaching Quality Assessment) has had little remarked but beneficial effect on relationships between library and academic departments – at least those undergoing the visitation. Visits are carried out to all the departments in a discipline in all universities to a known cycle, planned and announced several years ahead. The visits are conducted by externally appointed peer group panels. The TQA visitors award a score based on the total of points for specified activities. With four points at stake for academic services out of a total of twenty-four, and with a score above twenty required for an excellent rating, departments, for perhaps the first time, need the library to work well and relations with it to be demonstrably excellent. Lists of course readings appear as if by magic, senior members of the department take an interest in the workings of the library for the first time, and dialogue on service is undertaken. The best libraries have also begun to realize that they can play a quite active role in the process. They and the University Registry (who organize the visits) have come to form the pool of institutional expertise on such visits. It becomes possible to offer tutorials to departments due for inspection on what to expect. All in all, the experience is very beneficial, if used to proper effect.

Library issues

The most pressing if least original issue is funding. Two new elements have been added to this traditional problem. The most intractable is the need to continue the purchase and provision of ‘old’ paper based materials while acquiring a growing range of often duplicate electronic materials. Since it will be some time before electronic resources command the confidence of librarians and users, this double funding will have to continue. At the same time, we appear to be going through one of those cyclical phases when decentralized funding is in fashion. Chief Librarians must spend increasing amounts of time seeking funding from heads of department or deans of faculty. This change is generally coupled with an increased desire to deliver more user focused and user defined services; it will be interesting to see what emerges from this period of the piper calling the tune.

There is a fashionable naivety which assumes that the Internet will provide both a universe of information and the tools to make it easily accessible. This ‘dumbing’ of the Internet seems to lose sight of the role of the university at the frontiers of creating and disseminating knowledge. More reflective views will surely develop which suggest that the purpose of university education is to stretch the mind and that abstract concepts and systems cannot be reduced to the level of reading texts for three year olds. In step with this we must assume that the need for training will grow, that it will be ongoing and that user instruction will remain a central concern of libraries.

Such training will have many disparate elements. The emerging experience at Tilburg (Geleijnse, 1995) is that students make substantially greater use of the library or information centre, while academic staff make less use, expecting support in the office and at the desktop. Yet as research into the research process has shown, ‘academics have strong perceptions of the usefulness of their existing information methods, and low perceived needs for the digital library, so are less likely to make efforts to find out about it, to train and to learn to use it’ (Barry, 1966). Established academics also inhabit a rich information world where much information flows to them from their peer group without being actively sought (Squires and Barry, 1997).

This dichotomy of need poses substantial issues for the management of training within institutions. This mass education is being addressed with more or less fervour and ability by all institutions. Ultimately it must have an impact on the training of future professionals, and the almost perpetual debate over how to train for the future is made much sharper by these emerging needs. Professional education (Elkin and Wilson, 1997) should perhaps worry senior practitioners more than it does, and how far librarians will be required to adopt more formal roles as teachers and trainers seems likely to be a growing concern over the next few years.

The future of electronic journals also gives rise for concern. On the one hand the large commercial concerns are running experiments which seem to paint a future – at least in the science, technology and medicine (STM) area – of a high cost future with economics little different from the present, but an added burden of technology costs. Even in such commercial ventures, scaling up from experiments to services shows massive problems (see, for example, Elsevier,1966). At the other extreme lies the Harnad ‘subversive’ model pioneered by the physics pre-print service of Paul Ginsparg at Los Alamos. ³ It offers huge cost savings, but lacks key elements such as version control and peer review, although these are being addressed. Libraries find it very difficult to react to such radical developments and almost every process from acquisitions and cataloguing to preservation needs to be considered from first principles.

The access versus holdings (also known as ‘just in time’ or ‘just in case’) debate continues and is made even more pointed in an electronic environment where commercial suppliers tend to lease rather than sell data and where there is no culture of holding electronic data locally as yet. The Catriona Project based at Strathclyde and Napier Universities is exploring some of these issues. The University of East Anglia has long been a proponent of an access strategy and its work on the cost of document delivery versus purchase has led to more research under the Electronic Libraries (eLib) programme. It has perhaps the most coherently constructed strategy in this area (Baker, 1996). Yet for some to have access others must hold and the major research libraries who expect to hold collections have banded together to form their own association.

CURL

The Consortium for University Research Libraries (CURL)⁴ has been slowly but steadily expanding for the last decade beyond its founding group of seven members, and now has some twenty members. Its mission is ‘to promote maintain and improve library resources for research in universities’. CURL’s objectives are: to develop cooperative solutions to the tasks faced in the acquisitions, processing, storage, preservation, exploitation, dissemination and delivery of information and library materials for research; and to assist libraries in the Consortium to pursue and achieve their own institutional objectives. This creation of such an elite group may also be seen in the creation of the Russell Group, a self-selecting group of research universities, and its sub-group RUGIT (The Russell Group IT Directors). Although the Russell Group is dominated by institutions with medical schools and CURL is essentially based on libraries with strengths in their humanities collections, there is a substantial overlap between the two groups. CURL was dominated in its early days by the CURL database. Its creation was a major feat but may be seen as having, to some degree, distorted the development of the group. The database has now been leased to the JISC and is housed at the University of Manchester, where it is being made available nationally as an online public access catalogue (OPAC),⁵ which currently contains some nine million MARC records. This should link in interesting ways to the London and Manchester Document Access (LAMDA) eLib document delivery project. CURL has for some time had close links with the British Library and more recently has developed close ties to the Research Libraries Group in the United States.

The most important emergent issue for large research libraries is that of the preservation of electronic media. This is less of an issue where some concept of publication exists, and the UK government has issued a consultation paper (DNH, 1997) on the introduction of legal deposit. Although there are a number of practical problems associated with this, it offers a sensible and reasonable way ahead. Much more problematic is the electronic equivalent of grey literature, where much work is needed to determine the role and responsibilities of major libraries. The Data Archive at Essex University now has twenty-five years experience of the problems and issues surrounding such preservation and has shown them to be acute and expensive, but the preservation of electronic data is a vast new area for libraries and presents a responsibility which cannot be avoided and a set of new technical issues which must be addressed. Some of this debate has begun, see, for example, Feather (1997) and Law (1996).

It is an old saw – but none the less valid for that – that cooperation costs money rather than saving it. Nevertheless, cooperation is moving back into fashion as we move away from the competition of the early 1990s. Some cities such as Sheffield have a long history of cooperation stretching back decades, while others come to the issue with fresh vigour. Perhaps most notable amongst these is the Consortium of Academic Libraries in Manchester (CALIM), which appears to be trying to move towards the concept of a shared if distributed library for the Greater Manchester area, and the M25 Consortium,⁶ which is attempting to bring some resource sharing to the London area. Interestingly, these two groups have jointly set up the LAMDA (London and Manchester Document Access) project, which seeks to explore the possibilities for a distributed document delivery model. After eighteen months of funding as a Follett project it is on the verge of turning into a commercial operation and offering cheap but fast document delivery using Ariel software. Part of the attraction of this model is that it maximizes the use of revenue invested in collections within higher education. Instead of document delivery going to third parties outside HE, revenue is recycled within the community.

Further cooperation may be expected following the generally favourable review received by the Anderson Report (see below).

IT issues

The most difficult emerging issue is that of desktop support. The number of computers in libraries is burgeoning and electronic resources are becoming everyday rather than exotic tools. This has implications for training. Much is made of the growing IT skills of new students (although whether the ability to use Nintendo displays gives much in the way of IT training, other than a high level of hand-eye coordination, is a moot point), but they cannot be expected to be familiar with the growing range of electronic resources available to students. Training is a growing problem, one shared by library and computing centres and one of the main justifications for convergence. Much of the eLib funding is going into training projects such as Edulib, Netskills and TAPIN,⁷ aimed at training trainers to pass on information management skills. But the problem is wider. The need to ensure that all public clusters of PCs and private PCs in offices hold the appropriate version of software from browsers to image viewers is a major task. The solution of the ‘common desktop’ is much discussed, whereby only a standard set of software and retrieval tools is provided and supported. Those with different needs must purchase their own support, rather than have it provided by the institution.

Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) offer further enticing possibilities. Cross-sectoral development of services on JANET has been held back by the acceptable use guidelines, which determine by whom and how that national network may be used. MANs offer a much greater freedom. Thus far their creation has been determined largely by technical considerations, but thinking is beginning to turn in a number of cities to how they may be exploited. The recently funded People Flows study which will measure cross-sectoral use in Birmingham and Sheffield ⁸ may help to develop some measures of the importance of such use, while London and South Eastern Library Region (LASER) is formulating plans for the experimental use of the MAN in the central London area.

The Follett Report

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the British University system doubled in size with the number of students participating in higher education doubling from 18 per cent of all eighteen year olds to well over 30 per cent. Needless to say there was no simultaneous expansion of buildings, teaching staff or libraries. At the same time the JANET network was expanding its services under the aegis of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and developing a programme of nationally networked services such as the Bath Information & Data Services (BIDS) (Law, 1994). The space problems of universities became so acute that in 1992 Sir Brian Follett was asked to chair a committee, which was to consider the implications for libraries of the expansion of the system and its implications for teaching and learning. Almost from the beginning the Committee decided it must consider research, and notably the pressure placed on library budgets by huge rises in periodical prices. It was the first national review of libraries for some thirty years.

The Committee worked swiftly in a series of sub-groups and the report was published by the end of 1993 (HEFCE, 1993a), with a large series of recommendations for action and funding, as well as a series of working papers (HEFCE, 1993b; HEFCE, 1993c; Sumsion, 1994). The report was well received and some of the proposed activities received immediate funding. In some other areas action rather than funding was required and a general enthusiasm for action has been turned into activity. Some further studies were also commissioned. The Follett Report called for vigorous action and a sea change in the way libraries were organized and managed. Dramatic change is now there for all to see. Given that much of the on-going work related to IT, the management of the centrally funded programme was handed over to the JISC so that it might mesh in with existing electronic library services.

Unfunded initiatives

Perhaps the key recommendation was the need for universities to have an information strategy and that this strategy should link in to the other strategies of the institution – for research, teaching, estates etc. This strategy should not confine itself to the library but should look at all information resources. The corollary of having such a strategy is that the institution should be able to resource it. These strategies are now almost universal and have forced universities to consider how and why they use information and the role of the library in this. In order to ensure some consistency of approach, six sample universities have been selected by JISC to pilot a standard approach to the creation of information strategies. They will spend three years creating and implementing strategies, reporting back to the community during the process on the pleasures and pitfalls of this approach.

There was also a drive to develop a set of common performance indicators, which would allow some comparison of universities over time and between institutions. Despite the huge disparity in the nature and type of universities a common set of indicators was created by a group managed by SCONUL (the Standing Conference of National and University Libraries). Although the agreement reached was a remarkable feat given the disparate range and mission of HE institutions, there was some disappointment that the measures focused on the traditional book-based library.

In general then, the Follett Report has forced institutions to consider the role of libraries, to plan and then measure the quality of services they deliver.

Further studies

The Follett Report also commissioned or led to a series of related studies. The Anderson Report (HEFCE, 1995) emerged looking at national and regional strategy. It built on the work of the Follett Report in looking at various models for cooperation and the coordination of research collections. A draft was circulated to interested parties in the middle of 1995. Comments on this were received later that year but a promised final revised report now seems unlikely to be published. Despite this, the Anderson Report ideas have been picked up and seem likely to be taken forward. A questionnaire has been circulated to universities seeking information on collection strengths and external use. It seems likely that this will be used to inform proposals to create a regional and/or subject based approach to cooperation and access, in which major libraries will receive some central funding. This, interestingly, prefigures the funding of the latest Research Assessment Exercise, where so called DevR funds are to be used to allow cooperation between weak and strong research groups.

The Bryant Report ⁹ considered how much retrospective catalogue conversion would have to be undertaken if all collections were to be listed on OPACs. This has been costed at some £25 million. It is unlikely that money of this sort will be found, although it remains possible that a smaller set of special collections will be ‘cherry-picked’. Helpfully, Bryant also looked at collections of value to the research community, but outside the HE sector, in such disparate bodies as cathedral libraries and learned societies.

Other reports have been commissioned on such varied topics as copyright and intellectual property, and the availability of digital collections.

Buildings

Money for buildings was allocated on a challenge funding basis, with some £10 million allocated in the first year (1995), leading to about £35 million of spend n new buildings and extensions. A further call was proposed but subsequently cancelled due to savage cuts in capital spending for education made by the government. This large extension of library space is one of the most important but least remarked outcomes of Follett. Recent commentary by Macdonald (1996) considers not just the direct impact of the new buildings, but also the way in which the sheer scale of the programme has influenced and engendered debate on the future role of the library as a physical place. In a sense this has given form to the somewhat abstract concepts surrounding the newly received wisdom favouring access rather than holdings strategies.

Humanities special collections

Another consequence of Follett was the allocation of over £40 million of so-called Non-Formula Funding to some thirty-five institutions over five years for the preservation, cataloguing and support of special collections in the humanities. Plans were announced in October 1995 for the coordination of the deliverables from the 237 projects to create the basis of a national OPAC of research collections, a national archive location service, and a general improvement in access to rare books and special collections. These proposals have significant potential for linking with work in the national libraries and in other bodies such as the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the County Record Offices., and discussions began early on 1996 on how to take these forward. A very rich range of materials is being supported from traditional archives to film archives and collections of trade union banners. Many historical library collections are being funded as are those in minority languages. It is a condition of grant that access to the collections must be granted to all researchers. A committee chaired by Ian Mowat, Librarian of Edinburgh University Library, is monitoring the programme (JISC, 1997).

The eLib programme

Perhaps the jewel in the crown, however, is what has become known as the eLib programme, which consists of some twenty electronic services and fifty projects. JISC set up a sub-committee known as FIGIT (Follett Implementation Group on Information Technology) which defined a programme of work and called for bids. Within the FIGIT programme some 345 bids were received. After a rigorous refereeing process some 35 of these were accepted in the seven programme areas of Document Delivery, Access to Networked Resources, Digitization, Electronic Journals, On-demand Publishing, Training and Awareness and Supporting Studies. A further five studies and reports were commissioned on such varied topics as copyright and evaluation strategies. A second limited call in specified areas such as pre-print archives and student short loan collections was completed in January 1996.

The projects¹⁰ are a huge mixture of activity from the creation of small datasets in important subject areas to the creation of new document delivery services, to multimedia electronic journals, to internationally renowned resource discovery services and major training programmes. Unlike the European Union Libraries Programme it is a highly managed and interventionist programme where institutions are made to work together and where proposals are reorganized to meet defined central goals.

In 1997 the emphasis has shifted slightly. Attention is turning to which projects should be continued and perhaps scaled up as services and how this should be done. Further bids have just been sought for what is being called the ‘hybrid library’¹¹. This seeks bids which will attempt to integrate traditional paper-based libraries with some or all of the eLib and Information Services Sub-Committee (ISSC) products and experiments. It is expected that some consortia may emerge, although whether these are discipline or regionally based will be interesting to see. In either case there is a real prospect of addressing some of the dilemmas facing libraries as they attempt to meet the challenges of an electronic environment.

Information Services Sub-Committee of JISC

JISC’s other relevant committee, the Information Services Sub-Committee (ISSC), has been developing a series of digital library services in parallel with this activity. It has also picked up a number of recommendations for new services made in the Follett Report. A national Arts & Humanities Data Service has been set up, based at King’s College London; the feasibility study for a National Image Service has been delivered by De Montfort University; a national archives server is under discussion; a new Data Centre has been commissioned at Edinburgh University, which has already received contracts to mount BIOSIS Previews, Periodicals Contents Index and Palmer’s Index to the Times. Since it began to support network content in 1991, ISSC has played an important role in demonstrating the issues and problems associated with large scale national services. The first and best known, BIDS, is used by some 10,000 customers each day. This, perhaps more than anything else, has brought home to libraries the problems of training a mass community, where there is, almost by definition, no learning curve, given the brief time that students typically spend in the system.

A national journal site licensing scheme is being piloted. Arrangements have been made with Academic Press, Blackwell Scientific and the Institute of Physics Press to deliver both paper and electronic versions of their journals under a national scheme. It is intended that this will address the twin problems of journal pricing and the scaling up of journal experiments, to the point where the community can properly assess the value and problems associated with new media as a tool in daily use, rather than an interesting, esoteric, but rather minor set of experiments. Although savings will be made on the cost of paper journals in the short term, it is hoped that the provision of over 1,000 electronic journals from this and related initiatives will have a dramatic impact on the assessment of electronic futures.

A number of projects have been funded in the general area of resource discovery. ISSC, jointly with eLib, has funded several subject based services, which are based on a sort of inverse of Gresham’s Law and assume that good information will drive out bad. These services aim not to catalogue all that is available on the Internet, but only a small proportion which is relevant, of high quality and available. The guiding principle is that high quality information, well catalogued, well documented and reliably available will drive out poor information of uncertain status and available in an uncertain fashion. A good example of this approach is EEVL, an engineering service based at Heriot-Watt University.¹²

One of the interesting features of this whole growth of the Distributed National Electronic Resource is the way in which it concentrates on the building blocks of research – data, images, archives, special collections – rather than the products of research in the shape of back runs of journals. Some of these are, of course, being digitized, but this emphasis seems significantly different from that of programmes in other countries, which do concentrate more on the outcomes of research.

The sum of these activities has now (in 1997) been brought together under the banner of the eLib programme. This is managed through the Committee for Electronic Information (CEI), a sub-committee of the JISC, which is attempting to develop a core of material forming an electronic library for UK higher education, and then to embed that into the teaching, learning and research life of the universities.

Conclusion

Two general points are perhaps worth making. Firstly, this huge burgeoning of resource which is a consequence of the Follett Report will have a finite life of 3-5 years and is unlikely to be repeated in our professional lifetimes. There is a great opportunity to experiment and innovate, but with it goes a significant responsibility for the future of libraries and the profession. The quite unusual concentration on libraries as a central part of the educational process has provided an energy and dynamism in higher education libraries at a time when higher education in general is suffering a brutal financial regime imposed by government. The conscious attempt to spread projects and services amongst the largest possible group of universities is intended to help develop that cultural change which is central to the Follett Report.

Secondly, it is perhaps worth emphasizing that this is not new money provided by a beneficent government. It is money top-sliced from the higher education budget, a sort of voluntary tax which is an indication that leaders and policy makers in HE recognize the need for the UK to develop and sustain its leading-edge role in the provision of electronic services. Universities expect to be at the leading edge and the last three years have brought a welcome recognition that this applies as much to their libraries as to their high energy physicists.

Endnotes

1. In 1992, rather more than fifty polytechnics were re-designated as universities and moved from local government to central government control, thereby doubling the university sector overnight.

2. Some of the pressures this causes have been studied by the IMPEL Project at the University of Northumbria. A number of publications by Joan Day describe the project (e.g. Day et. al. 1996).

3. This is most fully explored in an email debate which has now been conventionally published (Okersen, 1995).

4. Its address is http://leeds.ac.uk/library/curl/intro.html

5. Its address is http://copac.ac.uk/copac/

6. Its homepage may be found at http://www.M25lib.ac.uk/M25/

7. e-Lib Programme Reports describing these projects are available at http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/elib/intro.html

8. This British Library Research and Innovation Centre (BLRIC) funded study is being conducted by the School of Information Studies at the University of Central England in Birmingham (BL Grant No. RDD/GC/961).

9. As well as a report on university collections, a further report has since been produced which attempts to summarize the position in the UK as a whole (Bryant and Bloomfield, 1997).

10. e-Lib Programme Reports are available at http://ukoln.bath.ac.uk/elib/intro.html

11. JISC Circular 3/97, available from HEFCE, Northavon House, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QD

12. The home page of EEVL is at http://www.eevl.ac.uk

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