Developing a quality culture for digital library programmes

This paper describes approaches for the development of quality assurance procedures which are needed in order to ensure that deliverables from digital library programmes will be interoperable. The adoption of open standards is widely acknowledged as essential in development programmes, but in a distributed development environment which is the basis for many programmes within the educational and research sector, it can be difficult to ensure that programme deliverables actually implement appropriate standards and best practices. The author describes the approaches to the development of a quality culture which is being taken by the JISC in the UK in its development of an Information Environment which seeks to provide seamless access to quality scholarly resources.