Intute wins the Jason Farradane Award 2007

The 2007 Jason Farradane Award, sponsored by Sage Publications went to Caroline Williams and the Intute community network. Intute is a free online service created by university subject specialists, with over 100,000 links to academic content on the Web, as well as a suite of virtual training tutorials and Internet information services.

The nomination describes Intute as "a great example of the UK library community taking a long-term pioneering role in the Internet information environment, developing a national service through collaboration, which has grown to become well respected and highly used worldwide." Intute has demonstrated extraordinary longevity in Internet terms.

Its origins lie in the 1996 Electronic Libraries Programme (a former winner of the Jason Farradane award). Later, the individual subject services were federated into the Resource Discovery Network (RDN). However, it wasn't until 2003, when MIMAS at Manchester University Computing took on the service and appointed Caroline Williams as Executive Director, that it begun to mature into a single organisation with a unified culture, interface, technological platform and identity. One of the great achievements of Caroline Williams as executive director has been to create organisational strategies and systems that enable distributed teams to run a unified and coherent service.

The awards committee felt that this nomination strongly upholds the spirit of the Jason Farradane award in developing a product or service that has made a significant impact on the availability and accessibility of information. Intute's model of shared services has made the UK a world leader in delivering Internet services for education and research on a national level.