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The purpose of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of a research and development programme on improving craft practice through the provision of mentoring by academic practitioners, studio space and advice on marketing techniques.

Following an initial focus group investigation of issues which impinge on contemporary craft practice, recipients of a bursary associated with the research and development programme were assessed with respect to how their craft and marketing competencies have developed.

Practitioners can now reflect on their skills, experiment with techniques and consider the effectiveness of their approach and attitude towards marketing.

The programme only extends to practitioners working with one art and design institution but has implications for those concerned with creative practice elsewhere.

There is wider potential to reinvigorate artistic and marketing practice across the creative and cultural industries, and the small and medium enterprise community in general.

This is a novel programme which challenges experienced practitioners to extend their creative abilities in craft and approaches to marketing.

NewsAgent for Libraries is one of the projects funded by the Electronic Libraries Programme in the UK. Following a brief historical account of the original ideas behind the project, the main stages in developing the project – which aims to create a userconfigurable electronic news and current‐awareness service for library and information professionals with a mixture of content streams, including metadata – are described. Users’ interests are specified by profiles which are then matched with incoming records so that users are alerted by e‐mail of items of potential interest. Examples of creating profiles and of some of the “input feeds” in the project are given as well as an example of the use of the Dublin Core metadata format for describing resources covered in NewsAgent.