The project centres around a workshop of invited stakeholders for each line, where issues are explored and a set of recommendations drawn up. The first line focused on the distributed discovery, location and request of journal articles. This is to be held in March 1997. The second workshop was organised in conjunction with OCLC and addressed metadata for network information objects. The third line is on national resource discovery organising access to printed scholarly material.
Clumps are groups of distributed resources which can be searched together to facilitate discovery.
A particularly significant outcome of this workshop was the proposal for a National Agency for resource discovery. Z39.50 profile is also in draft form. Discussion focused on cross-domain metadata and discovery issues including use of the Z39.50 digital collections profiles. The final workshop on managing access to a distributed library resource will be held in April and will have a public library focus. The eventual aim is for a distributed systems model, where services are physically dispersed over the networks, but the systems behave as a single logical entity.