Big changes afoot during 2006 in the Resource Discovery Network, which is to be renamed "Intute"

The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) "selects, catalogues and delivers Internet resources for further and higher education". Currently there are 8 seperate free services within RDN, of which the best known are probably SOSIG (covering Social Science, Business and Law), and EEVL (covering Engineering, Mathematics and Computing). During 2006, the 8 services will be reorganised under 4 main subject groups, with a single interface, under a new brand: Intute. (At the time of writing this is simply a holding page.) A key question will be how the new services expose their records to Google and other search engines, since for many users, the first thing they do when looking for resources is to use Google, rather than to visit a subject-specific portal. As a result, unless these services expose their records to search engines, many potential users will remain ignorant of them, despite the fact that what they contain are properly curated resources.