Some Lines on the Occasion of ADAM's First Birthday

Chris Bailey and Tony Gill

A report on the background, progress and direction of the ADAM Project (http://adam.ac.uk) ,which is developing the art, Design, Architecture and Media Information Gateway as part of the JISC funded Electronic Libraries Programme. The purpose of ADAM is to help the UK Higher Education community to locate and access relevant quality assured networked information, by providing an on line catalogue . of resource descriptions created by trained librarians to agreed standards. Evaluation activities are highlighted, particularly the results of the 1996 ADAM Survey of User Information Needs and Search Methods, which provides a valuable insight into the attitudes of the user community towards the use of networked information as a research resource. A glossary of acronyms is provided.

KEY WORDS Art Design Architecture and Media Information Gateway (ADAM), Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), network resource discovery, user needs analysis, search engine, Internet