Refugee Studies documents to be put on the Web

Work has begun on a new project, to digitise a substantial proportion of the Refugee Studies Programme's unique collection of `grey literature'—valuable materials of an unpublished or semi-published nature—to make them available to scholars world-wide. The collection includes conference proceedings, seminar papers, field research, newsletters, and journals. The new three-year project is being funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with subsidiary support from the European Union PHARE programme. Funding of £500, 000 over three years has been agreed. The project will enable RSP documents to be made available over the World Wide Web, with delivery in a variety of electronic and non-electronic formats, customised to the disparate technologies used throughout the world. Searching through catalogue entry and free text will be made possible using the latest document management techniques. The project will also involve making materials such as distance learning packages related to the courses and summer schools taught by the RSP, as well as multimedia archives of images, film, video, and sound, available in electronic form in future. The manager of the Digital Library Project is Dr Marilyn Deegan, who has just joined RSP from De Montfort University, where she was Professor of Electronic Library Research. Formerly she was the Manager for Computing in the Arts at the University. The project has also secured further funding, as a partner in MALIBU (Managing the Electronic Library for the Benefit of Users) Project, one of five awards supported under phase 3 of the Electronic Libraries Programme. RSP and the Libraries Automation Service will work as partners in the project with King's College, London, and Southampton University. `This is an exciting project for us. It will put the RSP at the forefront of digital library developments in the UK', Dr Deegan said. `We also intend to develop a programme for new acquisitions.'