Linksphere is a JISC funded project that aims to link researchers and information. There are two strands to the project:

1. Developing a social network-like site to allow researchers to link to each other, while keeping control over who sees what,
2. Allowing access to a number of the University of Reading's collections.

Today we held a workshop for people who are interested in the project. We spent the morning investigating the social networking aspects, after a session in the lab experimenting with the prototype site , we moved back to the common room to investigate whatfunctionality attendees required, this was really fun, and I was forced to bite my tongue at times else I would have not allowed enough time for others tocontribute.
After lunch we turned to the representation of the data related to collections and the accessibility to this information and the actual collections themselves. I hadn't appreciate quite the diversity of these resources.
The Linksphere team is; Mark Baker, Hugo Mills, Pat Parslow and me from Reading; with Claire Warwick, Melissa Terras and Claire Ross from UCL.